WINDMILL INDUSTRIES LIMITED, the manufacturer established the same year Barbados became an independent nation, is reshaping its operations to remain viable 49 years later.
General manager Peter Miller says the producer of a well known range of items, including pepper sauce and mauby syrup, has formed a partnership with a company that is establishing a new factory. Windmill is also in talks with a financier in an effort to secure a new injection of funding.
“We’re having some changesto our business model because of the way the market dynamics have changed drastically where now you have a plethora of people manufacturing very similar products, including pepper sauce, which is our core product,” Miller told BARBADOS BUSINESS AUTHORITY.
“We have aligned ourselves with a company that is establishing a new factory, building a plant, and we have already signed a memorandum of understanding with them to look at having the product manufactured for us,” he said.
“I’m in talks right now with a group looking at financing. Finance is the last and most important thing that I need to get [the business back to where it was]. I’ve already done the executive summary and I’m finishing off the business plan to give to these people.”
Miller said that if all went well, “we could have enough money to set up a hub in Miami, manufacture here, ship to Miami, distribute across the United States and Canada”.
The company still sells “quite a bit to the [United Kingdom], New York and Canada”.
The former Barbados Manufacturers’ Association president said all of this was important not only for the Wildey Industrial Estate-based company’s survival, but in light of the fact that it had “rent arrears with the [Barbados Investment and Development Corporation]”, which had “been patient with us but I think their patience is running out”.
He also said that after reopening the company eight years ago with 40 employees, there were now down to five staff members who worked an average of three days a week.
“We were operating on a level back in the ’70s and ’80s, where our turnover was $2 million to $3 million a year and we had a factory that could sustain that demand. Now, we find ourselves in a position [where] the demand dropped drastically. We’re lucky if we do half million dollars in sales now.
“We still have the same infrastructure, the same overheads and the only thing that would have changed is our wage bill,” Miler said.
“We had to take a hard look at what we were really doing. The Windmill brand was started in April 1966; next year, if it survives, it’s going to be 50 years ago. We figured this is a good time to take a hard look at our model as it has become unsustainable,” he said.
Miller noted that the creation of a line of about seven Caribbean cooking sauces for meat, fish, and poultry, sugar free mauby, sorrel and ginger beer concentrates for diabetics and chutneys would be their “method of diversification”.
“We’ve also looked at the possibility of going into another Caribbean country where it is more economical to produce. That has been put on the backburner because we continue to fight with what we have here in Barbados.
“We have our challenges. Like everybody else, we have to make sure we take care of our statutory obligations [but] that has been very difficult given the business climate.
“We’ve gotten a lot of help from BIDC in the past. We know the BIDC is itself having challenges but we continue to be hopeful that this new programme that they and the Central Bank speak of will help us to regain some of the lost ground.”
He also said that selling the business was “an option but not one I will take readily.” (Green Bananas Media)
