Rachel Renucci-Tan: A #Womanpreneur’s “Rice” to the Top”

Successful women aren’t always successful.  They failed several times in life before they achieved success. They were broke before they earned their millions. They were ridiculed, laughed at, and put down before they rose to power. It takes years of perseverance, hard work, and determination towards the perilous path to success. We all have a personal calling as unique as our fingerprints — it’s entirely up to us to pursue our destinies. Our own will shape our future. We are our own forces. We have our own choices and our own responsibilities as women in business.

When I first met Rachel Renucci-Tan at The Peninsula Manila, I was struck by her grit and grace. I was in awe of her larger-than-life persona. Yet, here’s a successful woman without any trace of airs and graces. Instead, Rachel is grounded, kind, and authentic. These are just some of the traits that make her successful. It also helps that this inspiring CEO speaks fluently in English, French, Mandarin, Fookien and Tagalog. She was educated in the Philippines, the United States and France and has an MBA from “THE” INSEAD. Yet, she remains humble.

Rachel is one mega-womanpreneur with over 20 years of solid experience in business. Her expertise lies in real estate and agricultural investment management in Asia and in Europe. Rachel started one of the largest entertainment companies in the Philippines in 1994, and exited the investment in 1999. Afterwards, Rachel worked in Germany, Luxembourg, Paris, and London as a corporate finance specialist and as a real estate investment banking professional.

In 2009, Rachel founded TAN-EU Capital — a real estate funds management platform investing in China. She single-handedly raised a total partnership value of US$400 million from blue-chip institutional investors and from one of the most prominent real estate developers in China. If that’s not impressive enough, Rachel also successfully restructured and managed a troubled US$1 billion China real estate fund, the largest China fund ever raised. In 2014, Rachel founded Chen Yi Agventures — a rice production and operating company in the Philippines that transforms the way rice is secured from the farmers, produced, and distributed to its consumers. Rachel’s vision was to help the Philippines achieve self-sufficiency in rice, and then move on to exports, in a major push to help the world achieve food security.

When asked how to describe her business and how she started it, Rachel replied, “In 2015, my husband and I set-up Chen Yi Agventures, inc. (“CYAI”), the first sustainable and fully-integrated rice processing business of scale in the Philippines. CYAI is the producer of Renucci Rice and the award-winning variety, Dalisay, among others. As a Filipina-Chinese woman and the single largest shareholder of CYAI, I am the only female owner of a major rice producing company in the Philippines.”

“The destruction of Leyte in 2013 by the most devastating typhoon on record brought me back to the Philippines with the vision of rehabilitating Leyte while alleviating the poverty of its principal inhabitants — the rice farmers. My husband and I left our comfortable lives in Paris, London, and Hong Kong to invest our life savings in building the most technologically-advanced rice processing complex in Southeast Asia in Alangalang, then a third-class municipality of Leyte. We also dedicated their resources to mechanizing the province for the first time, leasing out transplanters, laser graders, tractors and combined harvesters to farmers, in order to increase their output,” Rachel added. It’s a business that keeps giving. It’s not all about making money, it’s more about empowering others.

“We also established the Renucci Partnership program that extends low-interest loans in-kind, consisting of high yielding seeds, fertilizers, and pest management to the farmers, while developing a high-tech farming protocol to ensure that farmers increase their productivity from 2.5MT per hectare to as high as 8MT. Farmers repay their loans by selling their harvest back to CYAI at the prevailing market rate. Around 4,000 farmers and their families have benefited from the Renucci Partnership program and its related Renucci paddy procurement program. In the latter program, CYAI directly procures paddy from the farmers, eliminating the layers of middle persons, thereby increasing the income of the farmers,” Rachel further elaborated.

“In addition to alleviating poverty for farmers, CYAI successfully produced Dalisay rice which was awarded one of the top 3 rice in the world in November 2019 by the World Rice Conference,” said Rachel.

With much pride, Rachel shared,  “This is the first time that the Philippines, known as the world’s second largest rice importer (next to China), has won such a prestigious award. Furthermore, the town of Alangalang in Leyte has recently been upgraded from 3rd class to 2nd class municipality, with hotels, fast food chains, and shopping malls, including ATM machines sprouting up amidst the rice fields.”

“This can be directly linked to the higher spending power of its residents – the farmers who benefited from the Renucci Partnership program and the Renucci paddy procurement program, as well as the significant employment generated by the rice processing complex of CYAI. Another key impact of CYAI’s business model is that 90% of the province of Leyte is now mechanized, as new entrants replicated the model of CYAI, and invested in tractors and combined harvesters which they lease out to the farmers. CYAI continues to charge the lowest leasing fees in the entire province,” Rachel enthused.

This writer knows first-hand what it’s like to have so many challenges when you run your own business. It’s common knowledge that womenpreneurs eat “challenges” for breakfasts. Daily challenges are the norms for a successful womanpreneur.

On the subject of challenges, Rachel sighed with relief. “Fortunately, I have never really felt discriminated against, even if the rice industry is predominantly male.”

What I found most endearing in Rachel was her strong sense of faith.

“The grace of God sustained me and has allowed me to keep going. My faith in His presence, His will, His greater plans for us. I also fervently believe in our mission of uplifting our farmers from poverty and producing world class rice for the Filipino people. I believe that in the long run, chemical free, freshly produced rice that not only tastes good but is healthy will win. If we keep on helping our farmers, increasing their output and improving the quality of their harvest by using the right inputs and the best technology, we will succeed.”

Rachel stated, “Our economy will recover and the first thing that consumers will do is to spend on things that are sacred for their well-being. That’s good rice, delicious, healthy rice, rice they can trust because they know exactly where it comes from. Rice that’s produced by Filipino farmers. Rice that’s got the quality because the best technology was used to produce it.”

What could be the most important thing for her at this point in her life?

“I am grateful that my family and all our friends in Paris, Nice, Maryland, Athens, London, Mallorca, Hong Kong, Manila, Cebu and Tacloban are healthy, happy and blessed,” Rachel answered.

“I am grateful that our Renucci farmers in Leyte continue to plant and harvest palay in abundance, despite wave upon wave of calamities, and that we have been able to procure most of their harvest. This year, we even went as far as Samar to buy palay, harvesting for free and paying higher than prevailing market rates just to help the farmers of Samar,” continued Rachel.

“I am grateful that our business continues to grow at a speed one would never have expected amidst this pandemic. Our expanding base of customers continues to trust us, as we navigate the economic impact of the pandemic together with them. Our customer loyalty rate has gone from zero to 38% in 15 months, which is nothing short of miraculous, given that there is no brand loyalty in a commodities market such as rice.”

“Thank you 2021 for the hard lessons and the unbearable fight, for the flickering yet radiant light emerging at the end of a long and arduous tunnel, for the humility that comes with being nearly beaten by forces that we cannot control.”

For someone like her to be able to continue soaring, there must be some kind of motivation. “I read the autobiographies of self-made entrepreneurs who describe their near-death experience trying to make their businesses work. Almost all of them nearly went belly up before they were able to finally succeed. They all share the following traits: grit, perseverance, refusal to give up, passionate belief in their product, willingness to be flexible, nimble and quick to adapt to rapidly changing market conditions,” shared Rachel.

Every business starts with the right idea. And Rachel agrees, “It just feels right. Execution, whilst challenging, just flows. I meet the right people who help develop and implement the idea. It just grows – even if never ending obstacles threaten to obliterate the idea – somehow, I find ways to untangle the knots and to resume the flow.”

For all the aspiring womenpreneurs out there, Rachel has an advice: “An empowered woman has self-knowledge and knows exactly how to leverage her strengths and compensate for her weaknesses. She understands the economy of her needs and her desires, knowing when to give and when to take. She  decides when to capitulate and when to take control. She chooses her battles wisely. She also accepts defeat gracefully and learns from them. She understands that wars and not battles must be won.”

“An empowered woman always listens to the murmurings of her heart, knowing what she wants and how to get what she wants. Nonetheless she also accepts that not everything she wants is possible to have and therefore she will knowingly make sacrifices. She understands the costs and benefits of the economy of her desires and her needs: fulfilling some and foregoing others as she reigns over a nexus of relationships, each one having his/her own economy of needs and desires for which she is partly responsible. She is after all at least one of the following: daughter, mother, wife, partner, homemaker, employee or business owner,” Rachel added.

“An empowered woman knows intuitively that happiness can never be perfect and that deep personal fulfilment can only be earned in time based on the choices SHE makes for herself and for others. She, nobody else, is the master of her universe.”

https://youtu.be/N8sFCg-xF2M

When it comes to her fair share of failures, Rachel is more than willing to share, “When the pandemic started, due to panic buying and the economic perils of extended home quarantine, the supermarkets and various LGUs across the country started buying rice in massive quantities. Business was great since we were one of the few producers that responded swiftly with our distribution team delivering rice across the country at full capacity. We invested in several contiguous apartments across our warehouse in Makati to quarantine our sales and logistics team, providing meals, vitamins and PPE, so that they could fill orders and deliver across Metro Manila, Cebu, Quezon, Legazpi, Bicol, among other areas nationwide. Our production and farm ops team in Leyte were likewise quarantined in our rice processing complex so that they could operate 24/7 to produce rice on demand.”

“That was the calm before the storm. Maybe not just the calm, but also the euphoria brought on by the adrenaline triggered amidst the crisis. Then national lockdown persisted and just wouldn’t let up: ECQ, MECQ, GCQ, back to MECQ then GCQ. LGUs exhausted their budget and people lost their jobs; businesses entered a hiatus and many failed. Supermarkets stopped ordering rice as they had enough stock from the panic buying months. Restaurants shut down. We lost most of our customers, and when they did come back, they ordered at 30% of previous capacity,” said Rachel.

“It suddenly didn’t matter that we produce world class rice. It didn’t matter that we had helped our farmers get through the pandemic. Cheap imported rice that cost less than our palay had flooded the market. Facing deep economic uncertainty – either already unemployed or about to be unemployed – consumers who once didn’t think twice about spending on Dalisay at P1,925 per 25kgs now scraped their pockets to purchase at P900 – P1,150. Quality became a meaningless concept and rice had reverted back to being just a commodity – laced with chemicals or not, old and re-milled over and over or not – it didn’t matter. The savings bought more pork, more chicken, more fish. The savings would cover for the rainy days to come,” added Rachel.

“Like everyone else, we had to pivot or perish. As early as April, we decided to develop our e-commerce platform and to invest in it. We started selling rice on Facebook, Instagram and on our website. Pre-pandemic, we never imagined how much rice we could sell online. We offered free delivery across Metro Manila, Rizal, Valenzuela, Pateros, Malabon and Marikina; we have a community management team taking orders and responding to customer queries from 8am to midnight; we addressed all product issues at once and to the best of our abilities. In fact, we made such a stir that trolls started to trawl our FB page comparing Dalisay to NFA rice, forcing us to refund their money and to pick up their rice from far flung areas. Our FB page was taken down and all our ads shut down simultaneously more than once,” said Rachel.

“Besides strong online distribution, we also had to launch a second, lower cost variety to Dalisay – Dinorado Heirloom – as well as adjust the price of Dalisay. We had to be able to compete with the price of imported rice. This was a major challenge since we refused to compromise on quality. As public attention and public outcry focused on the plight of the farmers suffering from falling palay prices, the world forgot about the plight of local rice producers. Since we are not rice traders and we don’t import or mix imported rice with local rice, we were forced to survive the impact of a marginalized local rice industry,” Rachel further explained.

Rachel is the true epitome of a successful #womanpreneur — she’s perpetually out of her comfort zone, she doesn’t back off obstacles and tough situations, Rachel uses them to make her stronger.

What a mighty powerful woman! But, what I love about her are her demeanour and simplicity. What a truly inspirational womanpreneur! I’m both a friend and a fan — unabashedly!