The people who mix the butter deserve the same intelligence diet as the people who trade it. The Konkan Daily was our answer — an edition written for operators who read ingredient decks, covering palm substitution, cocoa pricing, and the lipid market around them. It is currently paused; leave an address and we will write when it resumes.
Each edition was a single, carefully reported piece written for three people: the bench formulator choosing between kokum and shea for a new stick; the procurement manager holding a cocoa-butter PO she would rather not sign; and the founder deciding whether this is the quarter to switch suppliers. That is still who it is for when it comes back.
Daily closes for London cocoa (ICE), Chicago soy oil, shea FOB Accra, and Indian kokum and mango-kernel mandi prints. The desk flags when the cocoa ceiling breaks £8,000/t, when shea dips below $3.50/kg FOB, when kokum crosses ₹520/kg ex-Ratnagiri — and why it matters for the next three weeks of your formulation sheet.
Earnings, capacity, litigation, leadership changes at AAK, Cargill, IOI Loders Croklaan, Bunge Loders, Manorama Industries, 3F, and Wilmar. Plus the Indian D2C landscape — Honasa, Forest Essentials, Minimalist, Pilgrim, Juicy Chemistry, RAS Luxury, Earth Rhythm, Nykaa, Tira — tracked for SKU launches, funding rounds, and ingredient pivots that affect demand for your butter.
CDSCO notifications, BIS draft standards, FDA MoCRA compliance windows, EUDR enforcement against cocoa and palm, DGFT RoDTEP rate changes, GST council decisions. The desk reads the gazettes so you do not have to, and says which ones actually bind your label.
Every India clean-beauty deal over $1M in the last fourteen days. L'Oréal and Estée Lauder India moves. Private-label acquisitions in specialty fats. What a deal tells you about where your butter will be sitting in a supply chain six months from now.
in-cosmetics Global, in-cosmetics Asia, Cosmoprof Mumbai, Beautyworld Middle East — who is exhibiting, who is hiring, who is hunting for co-manufacturing. DGFT export-incentive windows. Live RFQs we have seen on our desk.
Every issue ends with five concrete plays, ranked in order. "Hedge your cocoa butter spend for the next quarter — here is how much, here is where." "Reserve your kokum allocation before the May harvest window opens; the window is 47 days." Numbers. Deadlines. No abstractions.
N° 001 was the last edition published. Leave an address below and you will get the first one when the desk restarts.
The desk is paused while we rebuild the publishing cadence.
The Konkan Daily is currently paused. Leave an address and we will write when it resumes. The desk is small. The list is smaller.