GEISHA KOW­LESSAR-ALON­ZO

A $15 mil­lion dol­lar in­vest­ment in its yo­gurt line con­tin­ues to reap healthy re­wards for Cream­ery Nov­el­fties Ltd. So much so, that the com­pa­ny is ol­low­ing sev­er­al lu­cra­tive leads for ex­port.

The com­pa­ny’s share­hold­ers and di­rec­tors, Paul Gabriel and John Hadad, spoke to the Busi­ness Guardian on Tues­day about this lat­est ven­ture and plans go­ing for­ward.

Gabriel ex­plained that the yo­gurt line was in the works for about three years, shar­ing that there were a lot of chal­lenges get­ting the plant up and run­ning.

“It is as with any plant, but yo­gurt is a bit more tech­ni­cal be­cause we’re deal­ing with bi­ol­o­gy. So it took us a while to per­fect the sys­tems and the op­er­a­tion of it be­cause with yo­gurt in par­tic­u­lar, the con­sis­ten­cy is very hard to get stream­lined and to make sure that you have that in place oth­er­wise, the prod­uct would nev­er be the same every time it goes to mar­ket.

“So we didn’t want to launch un­til all the ‘I’s’ were dot­ted, the ‘T’s’ were crossed. We were over a year be­hind on get­ting the plant up while we stream­lined every­thing and got all the process­es in place,” he fur­ther de­tailed.

The yo­gurt line, which comes in a va­ri­ety of of­fer­ings-nine flavours and al­so an unsweet­ened range, came out in June last year, and ac­cord­ing to Gabriel the re­sponse has been fan­tas­tic, with part of its mar­ket­ing strat­e­gy be­ing a lot of sam­pling.

On ex­port­ing yo­gurt, he said the com­pa­ny is in the process of get­ting cer­ti­fied and has its sights set on Bar­ba­dos, Ja­maica and Cu­ba.

Once all goes well, it hopes to be­gin ex­port­ing by the first half of this year.

Cream­ery Nov­el­ties was the vi­sion of Gabriel who ap­proached the Hadad broth­ers with an in­no­v­a­tive idea that they could not be re­fused, mak­ing it a re­al­i­ty.

In 2018, the man­u­fac­tur­ing of ice cream by Cream­ery Nov­el­ties be­gan, with prod­ucts en­tered the lo­cal mar­ket. To­day, the ice cream and frozen nov­el­ties are avail­able in An­tigua and Bar­bu­da, Bar­ba­dos, Do­mini­ca, Guyana, Grena­da, Suri­name, St Lu­cia, St Vin­cent and the Grenadines and St Kitts and Nevis with a con­tin­ued goal to strate­gi­cal­ly ex­pand its foot­print, be­com­ing one of the lead­ing brands through­out the Caribbean and Latin Amer­i­ca.

The com­pa­ny churns out about 6,000 litres of ice cream and hopes to get in­to the US mar­ket soon, start­ing with Puer­to Ri­co.

“We have two vis­its from them and we have an­oth­er one sched­uled in a cou­ple of weeks’ time. We’re do­ing a lit­tle bit of prod­uct de­vel­op­ment for them and ac­tu­al­ly, that’s a spring­board for us in­to the US...It works well for us be­cause as a man­u­fac­tur­er, the US mar­ket is 330 mil­lion peo­ple.

“So, there’s no way we can sup­ply that out to this plant, right or even re­mote­ly. Ba­si­cal­ly pick your bat­tles and pick your mar­kets. Even if we get in­to a ma­jor chain, they will box us in­to one coun­ty, maybe in Flori­da and then you start from there and once you’re sat­is­fied, you can grow out,” Gabriel said.

Like the yo­gurt, the ice-cream base is made from milk pow­der which is im­port­ed.

“So flavour­ing, most of that, if not all of it, comes from abroad and when you have sug­ar that you’re con­sum­ing, that comes from abroad. So when you look at the im­por­ta­tion of raw ma­te­r­i­al, the use of it, most of it is im­port­ed.

“..But suf­fice to say, we con­cen­trate a lot on the fact that there’s much that has been said about the im­por­ta­tion of raw ma­te­ri­als and why can’t we be self-suf­fi­cient? The fact of the mat­ter is that it’s way bet­ter that you im­port some raw ma­te­r­i­al and have val­ue add and brand­ing and every­thing to cre­ate a fi­nal prod­uct than it is to im­port the fi­nal prod­uct. And while we con­cen­trate on the fact that it would be nice to not have to im­port the raw ma­te­r­i­al, that’s a nice to have. The fact is are we go­ing to be self-suf­fi­cient as a coun­try, the size of ours, in terms of be­ing able to source, in our par­tic­u­lar case, sug­ar and milk pow­der and all of the nec­es­sary in­gre­di­ents that you need to make a fi­nal prod­uct like this? You have to im­port those prod­ucts,” Hadad said.

How­ev­er, a lot of pack­ag­ing is lo­cal­ly sourced from two or three com­pa­nies.

“And if you go to those pack­ag­ing com­pa­nies, they’ll tell you they’re mak­ing their pack­age out of raw ma­te­ri­als com­ing from abroad be­cause who’s mak­ing the plas­tic pel­lets? Where’s the card­board com­ing from? Where’s the foil pa­per as an ini­tial prod­uct com­ing from?” Hadad asked.

Over the years, Cream­ery has con­tin­ued to be a strong per­former, so much so, that is is now a net forex earn­er, which was al­so made pos­si­bly through the Ex­im­Bank fa­cil­i­ty.

“Ex­im­Bank has been re­al­ly a game chang­er...the way it works is that de­pen­dent on your ex­ports, you get the mon­ey you need for your raw ma­te­ri­als. Ob­vi­ous­ly, there’s a cal­cu­la­tion, it’s not that straight­for­ward but that has helped us when we were a net user of for­eign ex­change in Cream­ery.

“That has helped us grow in­to ex­port­ing now. I would say in the last two years, where we are a net own­er of forex.

“So our ex­ports are more than we con­sume in terms of US dol­lars and we ex­pect that to grow sig­nif­i­cant­ly in the next five to 10 years be­cause the ges­ta­tion pe­ri­od of the first five, six, sev­en years of re­al­ly es­tab­lish­ing your­self and es­tab­lish­ing a brand and gain­ing con­fi­dence in the mar­kets and all of that hard work has been done and con­tin­ues to be done,” Hadad said.

What’s next for Had­co?

Had­co con­tin­ues to grow ex­ports.

“We have grown that quite sig­nif­i­cant­ly in the past eight years as a group and we see a huge up­side in terms of our US dol­lar earn­ings. So our fo­cus is a lot more on hard-cur­ren­cy earn­ing as a per­cent­age of our rev­enue than it is of just grow­ing the rev­enue per say be­cause it’s un­sus­tain­able to con­tin­ue to use forex and dis­trib­ute im­port­ed prod­ucts the way we grew our busi­ness in the first 25 years.

“Now in the last eight years, it’s been quite dif­fer­ent in terms of grow­ing that hard cur­ren­cy. We’ve done a very good job of that as a group,” Hadad said.

Cream­ery Nov­el­ties has of­fered thus far cher­ry co­conut, cher­ry vanil­la, straw­ber­ry rip­ple, choco­late rip­ple, choco­late rip­ple, straw­ber­ry cheese­cake as well as ponche de crème and sor­rel dur­ing the Christ­mas sea­son as its ice cream flavours.

How­ev­er, more flavours means hav­ing less freez­er space.

“And you al­ways end up with the top five skews that al­ways sell. So we’re in a sit­u­a­tion now of look­ing at both lo­cal and ex­port, see­ing what cream ris­es to the top and then chan­nelling our pro­duc­tion in­to that as well and our mar­ket­ing and ad­ver­tis­ing to­wards that,” Gabriel said.

He said the com­pa­ny does rough­ly 6,000 litres of ice cream a day.

Cream­ery’s ex­port man­ag­er, Vashish Sieu­ra­js­ingh, fur­ther not­ed that “on any giv­en month’ about 10 to 12 40-foot con­tain­ers of ice-cream are ex­port­ed.

Last year, US $3.95 mil­lion worth of ice cream was ex­port­ed.

This year, pro­jec­tions es­ti­mate US $5.5 mil­lion but can climb to US $6 mil­lion once plans are fi­nalised to ex­port to Puer­to Ri­co which can be as ear­ly as May, Sieu­ra­js­ingh added.