THE INCREASING NUMBER of consumers choosing local food is feeding the demand for new products at the Barbados Agricultural Development and Marketing Corporation (BADMC).
With people buying Carmeta’s branded flours, the sorbets, cookies, local fruit-infused great cake, seasoned meats and sausages, the state company’s divisional head, agribusiness Ann-Marie King told BARBADOS BUSINESS AUTHORITY that “it’s not just about doing agriculture or doing food innovation and selling products, it’s about seeing how we can truly activate agriculture and agribusiness again in Barbados.”
During the interview at this year’s Agrofest which she noted was a “testing ground” for the products such as the fish ham, she explained that although food production manager, Carlton Batson, meat specialist Anton Murray and crop specialist Alyson Shook and other members of their food innovation team came up with ideas, they were willing to try suggestions from others.
“Sometimes we have an event coming up and there are things that they’ve been trying out. We decide, ‘you know what, let’s see if we can take this one through to commercial fruition and take it to the market. We have many, many other ideas. There’s banana rum jam . . . [and] we also tried a banango jam, which is a banana mango jam. We have lots of other things in our back pocket that we haven’t quite brought forward. The fish ham would be the latest thing that we are bringing forward to making it commercially viable,” King said.
“We’ve recognised that quite a number of people are vegetarians. They’re lots of very health conscious Barbadians. For all the other obesity and other chronic non-communicable diseases we have in Barbados, they’re many people in Barbados who are becoming health conscious for numerous reasons and lots of people have been asking for vegetarian options and options that are not just meat based.”
She added: “So, we thought let’s try the fish ham. We decided to partner with one of the local fishery companies because we said we wanted local fish. We tried snapper, tuna, [and] a couple of other fish to see what was the right texture and flavour and what we found was that the local tuna worked really well. So, we decided to bring it here. We don’t have it on sale but we’re giving people the opportunity to try it and give their feedback, then we’ll fine tune and go from there.”
The sorbets, she said, are “an option to regular ice cream which is usually quite high in calories”.
“Of course, too there’re many families saying: ‘I have a child who is lactose intolerant, he/she is celiac, please give them something to enjoy’. What we’re trying to do is capture those local flavours, all the traditional flavours in new and convenient ways to enjoy,” asserted King.
“The response has been lovely and at times overwhelming. We had a fabulous Christmas. All of our sorbets sold out, the great cake sold out in a couple weeks, we sold out the breadfruit pork roast, burgers, sausages and pork. We have to think in a business-like fashion when we select what options we’re going to take on in terms of our product development.”
The agribusiness head also noted while working on the cassava value chain programme with the Ministry of Agriculture, Food and Agriculture Organisation, Caribbean Agricultural Research and Development Institute, they found that consumers had to drive demand for the products they were looking to produce.
“It makes no sense producing a product for which there’s no market. A developmental agency like ours has a bit of room that maybe the private sector doesn’t have to take the risks and to try new things and to get the juices flowing,” she said.
“What we plan to actually do, in the medium to long term with our product formulations, is not just do them to take them straight to market under the Carmeta’s name. We have a food consultancy capacity that we’re working on and what we hope to eventually do is ensure we get the intellectual property rights for our products and where possible, we will actually sell on, or licence some of these formulations to earn some foreign exchange for Barbados.”
King also explained that “the licencing is very interesting to us because lots of these products have never been heard of anywhere else particularly the sorbet, and even possible offer food innovation and new product development as a service”.
She continued: “What we have found is there’s been some interest, a little lukewarm, coming from the private sector which has really been thrown back by our new products. They have the financial resources that we don’t have but what we bring to the table is a lot of ingenuity.
“What our team likes is the fact that because we’re working in a developmental agency, we have a lot more room to manoeuvre. You can play, you can be creative with local food and that’s what I try to give my team. We are growing agribusiness together with Barbadians that’s what we’re doing now, at every level,” said King. (GBM)
