This blog is the result of a project initiated in English class at EM Lyon Business School. During the next 2 months it'll we uptaded on a weekly basis as we will develop a product in the same way as One Products are developped. (http://onedifference.org). For this week's post we will be discribing what product we chose to focus on, why and what first ordeals we encountered as we started planning everything.

Why did we choose this idea/product?

We firmly believe that properly feeding the 7 billion human beings on this planet is one of today and tomorrow’s biggest issues. As a matter of fact, one in eight human is suffering from chronic undernourishment. This staggering figure is all the more alarming that Africa and Asia host most of the people concerned with this phenomenon. We then came to the idea that pasta being a staple in MEDCs; it would be the perfect product for a new “One Product". Besides, growing the necessary wheat for making pasta is possible in dry countries, which is all the more convenient that it’s mostly where undernourished populations live.

What other products did we consider?

We first considered a toothbrush and toothpaste because they can be directly linked to a project: indeed, when buying a One Toothbrush or a One Toothpaste, people will help dental hygiene projects to exist. For example, we wanted to fund some missions in which Westerner dentists would go to poor African countries and sanitize people's teeth and train some local dentists. "One Smile" was really anchored in the "Like for Like" philosophy. Unfortunatelly, it quickly struk us that this project would very hardly be workable. In fact, profiding everyone with toothbrushes and enough toothpaste would have been very costly and we were not even sure that it would substantially change the lives of these people. Finally we thought that it was sort of like putting the cart before the horse as one needs to eat before brushing one's teeth and  undernourishment being a way more important issue we finally chose it. 

Why did we decide to choose the one we did and not one of the others?

We chose pasta as it is one of the most sold products in stores due to their low price and their status of staple.
Conversely, one does not buy a toothbrush every day and they tend to last quite a bit, so we would not have raised enough money for the Like for Like project to really be efficiet. We believe that a One Product has to be frequently bought by buyers, so we decided to focus on pasta. The idea behind that is that the "Like for Like" concept will be based on helping develop agriculture in general. We are not targeting one kind of crop but are rather focusing on helping farmers grow more and better by enhancing their knowledge regarding agriculture, the way they plough and work in the fields and the seeds they use. The potential efficiency of the Like for Like idea linked to agriculture eventually led us to choose pasta as we knew that the impact of the whole project would then be greater than with any other product ! 

What difficulties did we run into this week?

Finding the right product was no easy task as we did not really know which way to go. After giving some thoughts to the project it became obvious to us that undernourishment would be our theme. Focusing on pasta came as we were trying to determinate which product would offer us the biggest market opportunity. 
Finding an appropriate name also was quite challenging but putting our 3 minds at work altogether the name “One Seed“ quickly came up !

Where did we get our inspiration from?

We got our inspiration from looking at one of One’s videos where Duncan Goose is playing with little kids. They looked emaciated and we thus decided that undernourishment hadn’t been targeted by the One Project yet !