Activity To Avoid Food Wastage Becomes Thriving Family Business

The Portland-based Linga Ya Farms Limited supplies authentic fire-roasted breadfruit to the domestic and export markets, which is vacuum packaged.

The family-owned micro enterprise, located in the community of Dillon on the parish’s eastern side, commenced operations in August 2018 and evolved from a backyard orchard, into a thriving agro-processing and export business.

Linga Ya Farms is registered by the Rural Agricultural Development Authority (RADA) and certified by the Bureau of Standards Jamaica (BSJ) and the Ministry of Health and Wellness.

The business is also a registered member of the Jamaica Manufacturers and Exporters Association (JMEA) and registered for export by Jamaica Promotions Corporation (JAMPRO).

Since 2018, the company’s products have been available in select stores islandwide.

In 2019, stores at Norman Manley International Airport in Kingston and Sangster International Airport in Montego Bay, St. James, were added to the list of retail outlets.

The business commenced exporting, primarily, to Florida in the United States by the end of 2019.

Managing Director, Annakaye Saunders-Tucker, tells JIS News that the enterprise was the brainchild of her parents, who had moved to the Portland property for their retirement.

“It has always been their dream and they found their dream property, built a house on it, and the property actually came with over 100 breadfruit trees,” she notes.

“My parents have always been industrious, and although they never had a background in food manufacturing, they looked at it and said ‘we can’t have all of this breadfruit wasting’.

“So, my mother used to roast the breadfruit and vacuum package it on our kitchen table and freeze it, and whenever we had friends or relatives coming to visit or whenever we travelled, we would always pack the breadfruit [to take overseas],” she further informs.

After much encouragement from friends and family, what started out as an effort to avoid food wastage, was transformed into a full-fledged agro-processing business.

The first step in the process was to solicit aid from the SRC and BSJ to ensure the product is safe for consumption.

“Initially, SRC visited our property and gave us some recommendations as to how the production area should be built and what were the requirements. Then we went on to the Bureau of Standards to make sure that we were an established food processing facility that was approved by the BSJ and followed all the requirements [for] such a facility,” Mrs. Saunders-Tucker tells JIS News.

She notes that the BSJ inspects the facility every year, which is a prerequisite for maintaining registration.

“We also get inspected by the Ministry of Health and Wellness and get our public health certificate every year as well,” the Managing Director says.

Once the production facility was certified, investments were made in storage and transportation, which made it easy to distribute products to stores islandwide.

“We are located on the border of Portland and St. Thomas, between Manchioneal and Hectors River. We have storage facilities on the property, a walk-in freezer that we store our products in, and we invested in a refrigerated truck because there is not a lot of trucking going from our side of the island. So, we figured it would be better to have our own truck,” Mrs. Saunders-Tucker says.

The JMEA and JAMPRO were pivotal in helping Linga Ya Farms to expand operations overseas.

“JMEA helped in guiding us to what we needed [regarding] the legal requirements, registrations, what we needed for our packaging, and so on. We also reached out to JAMPRO, who helped us to know what the requirements for export were and [they] also started to include us in opportunities for export. We have attended trade fairs through JAMPRO. But we can’t just depend on that alone; you have to make your own road as well,” the Managing Director says.

The company also participated in JAMPRO’s Export Max III programme, which is designed to improve the competitiveness of Jamaican exporters and small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), spur increased export earnings, and diversify the nation’s export products.

Mrs. Saunders-Tucker points out that family and friends also lent support to the company.

“What we did initially was to spend time in Florida, reached out to friends and family to provide us with a list of stores [where] they purchase their Jamaican products, and we hit the road.

“We went up with two cases of product as samples and… made calls to supermarkets… visited them, showed them the product and, before we left, we were getting calls from those supermarkets saying ‘this is the name of our distributors’. We then met with distributors and narrowed it down to the distributor that we have now,” she tells JIS News.

For persons interested in getting into the manufacturing and export market, Mrs. Saunders-Tucker advises that “it is not a sprint, it’s a marathon”.

“If you are expecting to go into manufacturing and export and make huge profits immediately, then it is not the business for you. It will take some time for your business to grow; it will take some time to find the right mix of customers and distributors,” she points out.

For more information on Linga Ya Farms, persons may visit their website at https://lingayafarms.com.