PICTURES: PARADISE FOODS
MANUFACTURING
Paradise Foods CEO James Rice and workers receive new cocoa beans for production of Queen Emma chocolate.
A chocolate-led recovery Despite COVID-19, food and snacks manufacturer Paradise Foods may expands its operations in 2021, as it looks to develop a market for its unique Queen Emma chocolate. Gabriella Munoz reports. James Rice joined Paradise Foods, Papua New Guinea’s oldest food manufacturing company, as CEO in 2019 with the goal of doubling the business across five categories (oil, water, snacks, ice-cream and biscuits) in just three years. To this list, he added chocolate later.
Although 2020 was challenging for almost every industry, Rice reports Paradise Foods ‘has turned around.’ ‘Sales for the first half of 2020 were 31 per cent over the first half of 2019. We are now looking forward and planning significant growth investments starting in 2021,’ he tells Business Advantage PNG.
Queen of the Pacific In 2020, Paradise Foods signed a partnership agreement with the Australia-funded Market Development Facility (MDF) to help improve production of alkalised cocoa products. The MDF committed BUSINESS ADVANTAGE PAPUA NEW GUINEA 37
to help Paradise subsidiary Queen Emma Chocolate Company with the expansion of its processing facility. Paradise will build a K55 million Queen Emma Chocolate Factory in Lae in 2021. Rice says the new factory will be ‘20 times bigger than our current facility in Port Moresby.’ ‘We are a small chocolate producer on the world scale,’ says Rice. ‘But we proudly buy our beans from 2000 local small-scale farmers across PNG.’ Queen Emma chocolate is made of 100 per cent PNG cocoa beans and, as the brand expands, the number of farmers selling cocoa beans to Paradise Foods increases.
