By Thomas Herd By Thomas Herd | March 21, 2019 | Lifestyle,
There is perhaps no better way to spread a universal message than through a globally loved product.
Such was the conceptual design behind Los Angeles-based Tentera, an emergent Indonesian rooted, premium specialty coffee brand which is leading the global crusade for rainforest and wildlife conservation.
Tentera, the Indonesian word for "soldier" to mean “to fight for a good cause”, is the first brand that is exclusively devoted to spreading awareness of these meaningful issues on a global level and is doing it in radical style.
For instance, despite being sold primarily in foreign markets thousands of miles from the tropical islands of Indonesia, Tentera has strategically teamed up with prominent indigenous street artists such as Darbotz, who created an array of vivid package copyrighting for the company reflecting endangered wildlife, such as lions, tigers and orangutans that Tentera protects.
According to former real estate developer and current Tentera CEO and Founder, Michael Riady: “Conservation projects need sustainable funding, and to achieve its mission, you need constant and diverse awareness. Conservation cannot afford expensive billboards and TV slots, and nothing beats coffee because it has no boundaries. It reaches everyone, everywhere, everyday. Coffee is the second largest and most traded commodity after oil. And consumer products packaging are valuable real estate that we can utilize to share a story, through artworks. Tentera's grassroots copyrighting is starting to take wildlife conservation mainstream. Further, to translate the growing awareness into actionable results, Tentera Coffee Roasters donates two percent of all coffee sales—one percent going to support the Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS) headquartered in New York and the other one percent for the Planet.
Riady, following the footsteps of actor Leonardo di Caprio, visited the UNESCO World Heritage site call Leuser National Park (Asia's last great wilderness three times the size of Yellowstone with six million acres and the last place on earth where Sumatran orangutans, tigers, elephants, rhinos and sun bears co-exist in the wild) in 2017 with the Wildlife Conservation Society. This visit was followed by a subsequent trip in 2018 to Sumatran Orangutan Conservation Programme (SOCP) in Indonesia with Ian Singleton, a former zoo keeper and field researcher highly renowned in the field.
So far, the nascent company has raised and donated over $30,000 to WCS and has reached thousands of consumers with its edifying message. As we've seen across a variety of industries , millennials love brands which dovetail high performing products with strong ethical stances. Whether intentionally or not, Tentera has positioned itself excellently to ride the millennial wave and is poised to blossom into a serious market player in 2019.
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