The organic sugar derived from coconut sap has been recently gaining grounds as a potential business venture. With the upward trend on healthier lifestyle, adopting coco-sugar seems to be the best way to go. Further, the Philippine government?s support for healthier and more sustainable lifestyle movements is in full swing with various legislation already passed to ramp up production of organic goods. However, while the overall benefits of coco-sugar outweigh the negatives, the industry is facing a major roadblock as it is unable to satisfy its growing global market demand. This strategic paper then engaged in an intensive case study of Lao Integrated Farms, Inc. (LIFI) and its internal processes and existing strategies to evaluate the causes by which LIFI is unable to scale up its production. The following were the tools employed to fully analyze the situation of LIFI as well as to arrive at sound strategy: STEEP, Porter?s five forces of competition external analysis evaluation, problem tree, internal analysis evaluation, and objective three analysis. Under EFE, LIFI earned a generally acceptable score of 2.38. meanwhile, the IFE yielded a high score of 3.02 score which indicates a strong organization. Both of these results reveal how LIFI is maximizing its opportunities and strengths in order to achieve both scaling up of its production and catalyse inclusive growth for its value chain actors. The major strategies derived were backward integration, market penetration, product development, and focus differentiation that cuts across all other strategies aforementioned. Backward integration will address the core problem of being unable to produce coco-sap according to demand, market penetration will enable LIFI to capture not only the global market but the local market as well, product development will sustain the market penetration strategy through innovations from existing product and services, and lastly focus differentiation will empower key decision makers in the company to keep all strategies aligned and to steer the organization according to its identified goals. On the latter part of the paper is a systematic action plan for all functional departments of LIFI in the next three to five years. This action plan includes specific key results areas and key performance indicators that will serve as guide as strategies are being implemented. These KRAs and KPIs are measureable through the implementation of another tool called the Balanced Scorecard. This method will enable the management to clearly see progress or issues that may be indicative of failure of strategy of any phase of the strategy implementation. The complete implementation of these strategies will boost LIFIs position as a leading player in the organic farm industry as well as coco-sugar producer.

Thesis (Master in Management) -- University of the Philippines Mindanao, December 2018