If there is one thing that Barbadians like to do it is eat. Chicken, fish, pork, pigtails, beef, chips, rice, macaroni, breadfruit, potatoes, you name it.
And while it has been said repeatedly that many of them are not eating enough foods such as the ground provisions that our grandparents and great grandparents consumed, Strong Foods Inc.’s partners Kim Hamblin and Dwight Forde have set out to show otherwise.
For the last 13 months, from their Black Rock, St Michael base as well as at Crop Over fetes, and other events, they have been serving their increasingly popular roast breadfruit bowls filed with items such as pickled pigtails, bul jol, red herrings and lentil vegetable stew
In an interview with BARBADOS BUSINESS AUTHORITY ahead of their official launch over the weekend, they have added yam poppers with pulled pork and saltfish. They also serve sweet potatoes and will be adding other products as the business progresses.
The idea to roast and sell breadfruits commercially came from a group challenge – produce a product or service for the cultural industries or cultural tourism – while they were enrolled in the Youth Entrepreneurship Scheme (YES) in 2015.
“I was actually the one who had the idea during our brainstorming session to do something with roast breadfruit.
“I said let’s commercialise roast breadfruit. There’s no one out there that was capitalising on it.
“The others liked the idea and we combined it with one or two of the others that we had,” Forde said.
“At first I said we’ll call ourselves Yelluh Meat. We did for two days, because it was witty and playful and related to breadfruit. But I thought that somehow it wasn’t a serious enough company name, because even though it was just a project, early on I saw it as something that could go beyond that.”
He later came up with the name Strong Foods and the others liked it.
After the programme – and some changes to the group – Forde, Hamblin and one other person formed Strong Foods Inc., kept Yelluh Meat as the brand name and can today count young children among their customers.
“Our very first after work lime was December 18, 2015. At that time, it was our very close friends, people in our network that we reached out to…. I didn’t expect the response we got.
“My friend invited her dad who was diabetic and when he came he was like: ‘What is this?!’ He was so excited,” Hamblin recalled.
“He started calling all his friends and telling them come down to Black Rock ‘my daughter’s friend is doing this thing with breadfruit. If you see this thing you would like it.’ He left, came back and said he eat all of his but he thinks he’ll want another one.”
Forde added: “Our goal was pretty organic. We didn’t do a lot of marketing because it was just us.
“We invested in getting the company set up as opposed to doing other things we could have done.
“The breadfruit bowl as it is we developed post-YES, because during the project, we served roast breadfruit but we removed the skin and served it with bul jol.
“After YES, Kim and I got together and said while no one was doing roast breadfruit, it was easy for someone to come along and do what we were doing. Let’s do something a bit more unique. Let’s change it up. We got to thinking and it was Kim who came up with the form of the breadfruit bowl. Then I was able to put the name to it.”
With the growth, the company will now be opening Wednesdays through Saturdays and increasing their eight employees’ incomes.
“As we came through the year and as we looked at [the fact] that our food is very Bajan, it was designed to highlight, to lift and reinvigorate Bajan culture through food and put it out there more. …We made the decision to use Yelluh Meat to encapsulate the complete Bajan experience, because we do have roast breadfruit. That’s what we’re known for, but we do have other menu offerings,” Hamblin explained.
“We have loads of things which we want to roll out in the future to craft that full Bajan food experience, to try to be best at that here and then go on to export that and give the world a taste of authentic Bajan cooking.” (GBM)
