6 minute read
Interview - Tijule Company
FEEDING JAMAICA
Sustainable Business Magazine speaks to Roy Newell, Managing Director at Tijule Company Limited in Palmers Cross, Jamaica about the challenges of growing through the pandemic, products that are in high demand and utilizing resources surrounding them.
By Izzy Moss
Tijule Company Limited is as a family owned agro-processing company founded in 1982 through the vision of Dr. Juliette Newell a well-known nutritionist and food scientist. Tijule began exporting in 1984 to utilize wasted raw agricultural materials in Jamaica, despite at the time, having an underdeveloped agro-processing sector. The idea was to create something sustainable from indigenous Jamaican herbs, vegetables, fruits, spices and other agricultural produce readily available from female and male farm families in rural marginalized Jamaican communities; and create employment for local people predominantly in female-led households. Initially, the company began manufacturing sauces and condiments, jams and jellies from farm inputs like peppers, pimento, escallion, guava, cashews, bananas, breadfruit, chocho and avocados; canning fruits and vegetables under Juliana and Nels Old Time brands and has lately progressed to chilled fruit juices.
OVERCOMING CHALLENGES
Over the years, Tijule Company proactively developed a wide range of formulations for agricultural based products including frozen and precooked ready-to-eat meals but now limits production to 20 popular shelf stable products and frozen baked cassava bammy. The company takes pride in making healthy foods in a safe environment and as a priority consistently satisfies
international food safety requirements for the spread of the different markets. For example, FSSC 22000 V5 was Intertek re-certified in December 2021 while the United States Food Safety Management Act (FSMA) has been implemented to ensure future market requirements are in place. “The company has grown from a staff complement of about 10 to 108 to date plus seasonal workers, employing people from different backgrounds and qualifications,” says Roy Newell, Managing Director of Tijule Company. “We have diversified a lot over the years to keep the company sustainable as some of the products that we started out with have become highly competitive in the marketplace. Yet we have still managed to go into markets in the United States, Canada, England, Germany, Australia, and Japan. We added another line to make use of local fruits, sorrel, etc., and to help our loyal rural farmers earn more money to educate their children and provide for their extended families. Our main challenge over the years was that most factory work is labor intensive and we have to use a piece meal approach to retooling. As a family owned business that was undercapitalized, it is difficult to grow at a faster rate, but we have done well thus far with the help of our banks enabling borrowing funds to capitalize different aspects of the operation. We have built up a fairly reasonable corporate structure here with our community and we have intentions to increase exports and ambitions to make Tijule known as a national brand.”
The COVID-19 pandemic presented two challenges for Tijule Company to overcome. “With the event of the pandemic, there was information surrounding the expectations of what we should expect to change,” says Mr. Newell. The Food Safety Manage-
ment System was already in place so it was necessary to make a few minor adjustments to operations. “We had undergone a lot of investment in anticipation of this by setting up an off-site location to manage some pre-manufacturing processes, and the shortage of packaging materials and raw materials immensely affected our operation forcing us to invest a lot more into the selling process and acquiring more raw materials for storage and packaging. In terms of local impact, it was necessary to use resources for collection of raw materials from farmers instead of the normal deliveries at the factory. The international supply chain disruptions including high freight rate and logistic issues messed up our working capital a great deal and has affected our employees’ productivity as up to five months at a time we were out of packaging materials that come from China. Costly alternate suppliers filled the gap to meet our commitments thus increasing cost of production but not our products cost to the customers. The company has since added another product line – fruit juices manufactured and sold under the Clarendon Blends label that is more stable in Jamaica and easy to sell locally to build a lot more as a local market, along with the other products we presently have. It has made us aware of the
importance, now more than ever, of having a market within our country that can keep us operational in case the international borders are shut down.”
PRODUCTS IN DEMAND
Tijule Company is growing the export market for Jamaican agricultural and food products without much effort. “It is demand driven right now for the products we have had on our lines the longest, a wide cross section of sauces, jams and jellies,” says Mr. Newell. “We also have two canned and a frozen product, overall the demand has risen a great deal despite not investing more in marketing and advertising during the pandemic. Once we can get the capital, we will be able to buy more equipment to proceed at a faster pace. With continuous improvement programmes, the management system in place (FSSC 22000 V5 food safety system) allows us to continuously identify the risk factors to the operation. We have also implemented the United States Food Safety Management Act (FSMA). As a result, we can propose mitigating strategies be in place to counter each component of any aspect of the business that will come up with a risk to the operation.”
UTILIZING RESOURCES
In the near future, Tijule Company expect to increase its brand presence and see a lot more local raw materials being utilized for the new products that are to come. Tijule is intent on having extra agricultural inputs available for production and is engaged in growing some items on its own farm within easy access to the factory. Quality of life is very important to consumers globally and farm to table issues are high on our agenda. The company is working towards various international certifications such as Fair Trade, NonGMO, Gluten-Free, etc. The aim to provide more nutritional information and options to our global customers including some frozen or chilled products available as shelf stable shortly and having more innovative formulations in our product line within the next 3 years. “We will continuously impress upon our farming community and the overall country to produce more agricultural raw materials so we can feed Jamaicans,” says Mr. Newell. “We plan to make production more efficient, local and international consumers more aware of our products and make ourselves more competitive. We are going to continue liaising with our supply chain directly and indirectly by having ongoing conversation, meeting our corporate social responsibilities by planning activities, and forming alliances with our people in the short and long term. Self-reliance is a very important component of our present-day activities and operations. As a country, we would like to relieve ourselves of the dependency on other people to hand things down to us and make the best use of what we have. As a motto, in our operations we can approach every challenge by saying ‘let’s use the resources that we have. Let them fly and utilize the collective energy that we have around us as a team to meet our commitments because the same energy that surrounds us as a company in good times is the same energy that surrounds us when the economy becomes fragile and we face challenges.” c
