The head of a local manufacturing company has tagged a predisposition for substandard and manufactured products as one of the primary reasons for the low demand for locally produced goods.
Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of Amy’s Pomeroon Foods Inc (APFI) Louis Holder, whose company manufactures Amy’s Pomeroon Coffee (APC) has listed “cultural biases against local products” as a contributory factor to the underperformance of the manufacturing sector. In an article published in this week’s issue of the Stabroek Business, Holder cites his own product as being a victim of bias, alluding to an unnamed “major local supermarket,” which he said had refused to carry Amy’s Pomeroon Coffee because “its price was too high for a local product.” Holder said, “It didn’t matter that the coffee is a premium grade and has been favourably compared to Jamaica’s Blue Mountain brand, which retails for three times APC’s price.”
In his article the local businessman also chides a hotelier for “refusing to carry the product because he favours a certain foreign import and feels obligated to impose his preference on his clients.” Holder says these biases have meant that “consumers are still supporting inferior imports over a high-quality product made locally.”
Holder also takes aim at “government ministries,” with two named exceptions, which he said “continued to support imports after being exposed to APC and other local products,” though he says that President David Granger had recently “asked a couple of his ministers to evaluate the buying of APC by government ministries.” The article says that the local coffee producer is currently hosting tasting events at government ministries in order “to convince them of the quality of its coffee.”
And according to Holder “support for imports when superior products are available locally is a prescription for putting employees on the breadline and pressure on the country’s currency.”
Other local manufacturers have periodically charged that “foreign tastes” are largely responsible for the underperformance of the local manufacturing sector though Holder’s article has provided previously undeclared views on local consumer behaviour. Local analysts of consumer behaviour have cited concerns about product quality as well as packaging and labelling deficiencies as reasons for locally manufactured products’ lack of competitiveness when compared with imported products, particularly food products. However, it is now commonplace to see several items of locally produced foods on supermarket shelves alongside imported brands.
Holder, meanwhile, identifies exorbitant freight costs, high energy and finance costs and challenges to export to Caricom countries as other impediments to the growth of the local manufacturing sector.
In the instance of challenges associated with intra-regional trade, Holder relates an incident in which bureaucratic holdups linked to Customs and Revenue Authority procedures resulted in the expiration of seven weeks between the shipping of a consignment of coffee to Barbados and its eventual delivery to the consignee in Barbados “at substantial storage charges to the company.”
