BELITUNG -- Herbal medicine, a typical Indonesian drink that is rich in benefits, is often a favorite drink for maintaining health. Made from lots of spices often makes the taste of herbal medicine not quite right.
This is what motivated Friskila Mardiana to make healthy herbal medicine with a taste that everyone can accept.
This tough woman recounted that, when she first started her business in 2017, her family's economic pressure forced her to think hard in order to survive.
This is what made her start to pursue a healthy drink business, armed with a capital of IDR 50,000, she made a variety of medicinal herbs that are rich in benefits.
Friskila Mardiana processes various traditional health drink products such as spice juice drinks including sour turmeric, betel tamarind turmeric, betel turmeric majakani areca nut, bandrek, white turmeric extract, lime turmeric and kencur rice.
Her herbal medicine business continues to grow and has many enthusiasts. She has regular customers and several resellers to market the spice juice she produces.
"I am grateful that my spice drink product is accepted by the market and the response is good so that it can continue to grow and I have resellers to sell the product," Friskila said recently.
Her enthusiasm and perseverance paid off, her turnover continued to increase so that in 2020 she started thinking about developing another business, namely trigona honey.
"Initially I bought five hives, joined with friends. And it turns out that this one here is quite promising. The more it is controlled, the better the quality of the honey," she said.
The trigona honey business that he runs also continues to grow. She is even able to buy a garden to develop the kelulut honey cultivation that she is engaged in.
"I tried to develop it again to buy land for honey development and so far, thank God, it has developed and already has several gardens," she said.
To continue to develop her honey and spice extract business, she became a fostered partner of PT Timah Tbk so she could increase the marketing of her products.
"After becoming a fostered partner of PT Timah Tbk, people have more confidence in our products. So that more and more people are eyeing our products. PT Timah Tbk also helps with promotions with this news, of course it can increase turnover," she said.
Apart from marketing its products on Belitung Island, Trigona honey is also marketed on the marketplace. So that consumers also come from various regions such as Malaysia, Java Island, and Papua.
"The spice drink is the market for Belitung Island if Trigona Honey has penetrated the national and international markets," she explained.
She hopes that the PT Timah Tbk Foster Partner program can continue so that it can continue to help MSME players to continue to develop in marketing their products.
"After becoming a fostered partner, I made several efforts to improve packaging, increase marketing outreach, and this is what we hope that PT Timah Tbk can continue to help MSMEs to develop," she said.
