April 2018. Built at the Grow Asia Hackathon. A platform to streamline RSPO certification for smallholder palm oil farmers in Indonesia. No prize.
the problem
Getting RSPO-certified unlocks better prices for smallholder farmers — but the certification process is a bureaucratic gauntlet. Farmers need to gather land titles, IDs, and GPS polygon maps of their plots. They need to complete training coordinated by ICS group managers. They need to pass internal and external audits. The whole thing involves multiple layers: ICS trainers (backed by Unilever), farmer group managers, individual smallholders, agents, mills, and refineries — all coordinating through fragmented channels.
The bottleneck wasn't awareness or intent. Farmers wanted to certify. The process was just too hard to navigate without a clear, multilingual guide and a coordination layer between trainers and the farms.
what we built
FarmsToProfits was a web app that sat at the interface between group managers and their farmers — a combination of CMS, scheduler, and forum, purpose-built for the certification workflow.
Three things it did:
- Visual checklist — step-by-step RSPO certification requirements in simple, localised language. No jargon, no guesswork.
- Training coordination — scheduling and tracking between ICS trainers and farmer groups, replacing the informal WhatsApp chains that weren't cutting it at scale.
- Native language — the app ran in Bahasa Indonesia, because the people who needed it weren't going to use an English-only tool.
The demo ran live at ftm.ducheng.me.
the team
- Jackie — financial inclusion and insurtech founder
- Kenji — Japan Research Institute engineer and data analyst
- Putera — PMHaze founder and Indonesian sustainability leader
- Du Cheng — Grab engineer, built the app
the market
20 million estimated smallholder farms in Indonesia. RSPO certification increases farm revenue by a meaningful margin — the addressable opportunity for a platform facilitating certification was in the hundreds of millions. The $2B CPO market sits downstream.
what happened
No prize. The idea was directionally right — the RSPO certification gap for smallholders is a real and persistent problem — but we didn't win the room. The team dispersed after the weekend.