Rainforest taking bammies to the world

Rainforest on Thursday notched another significant milestone in its diversification/expansion plan with the official opening of a cassava processing plant at its headquarters at 67 Slipe Road, Kingston.

Journalists and a team from the Ministry of Agriculture and Fisheries, led by Minister of Agriculture Floyd Green, toured the facilities and got a close-up look at the company’s 1.5 megawatts capacity generation liquid natural gas (LNG) plant, before the opening ceremony. Each week it gets a supply of liquid LNG from New Fortress Energy, which is converted to gas before being piped to the generators, and has allowed the company to supply 100 per cent of its energy needs. This is backed up by two diesel generator plants and all the company’s water needs are met from wells on the property.

The touring party also got a glimpse into the state-of-the-art laboratory, where a number of tests are carried out on an ongoing basis on products to ensure their compliance with global sanitary and phytosanitary standards. A meat-processing plant is also under construction on the two-and-a-half-acre property, which will see beef, pork and chevon, among other carcasses, being fully harvested.

Green was clearly impressed by what he had seen, commending Rainforest for really driving the country’s agro-processing growth in a major way.

“We’ve been waiting to see a private-sector entity really answer the call and the charge of the Government to take these products and make them into something that the world wants, and Rainforest has done that,” he said, after leaving the cassava plant. “For us, this is a good day. This is what agriculture is about, not just about primary production, which is very important, but the value added and agro-processing and moving into markets that demand quality Jamaican products.”

Chief executive officer of Rainforest, Brian Jardim, explained that the investment in the cassava processing plant was a response to its quest to find something uniquely Jamaican and which is a perfect accompaniment to its core products – seafood. This plant, which will soon be upgraded with the installation of cooking line equipment en route from China, will position the company to take its cassava production to the next level and meet the growing demand from the diaspora for Rainforest bammies.

“We are just getting started,” he explained. “It’s a perfect add-on to those containers which we currently sail around the world, and the opportunity is there with this plant to do many other cassava-based products – chips, bread, sticks, and the list goes on.”

The plant now produces over 220 cases of bammies each week, which Jardim pointed out was the equivalent of a 40-ft container of cassava each week, supplied by local farmers. He said the plant is experiencing a production bottleneck, as it struggles to cook bammies fast enough to meet the demand across the region and the diaspora where it begun a new marketing thrust. The equipment from China will resolve that problem and position Rainforest to gain even greater market share of the global market for bammies, according to Jardim.

“It will give us the opportunity to take it to the next level and sell into the diaspora and across the Caribbean, which we are now doing quite aggressively in the US, Canada and the UK.”

In light of the growing diversification of its product line, which will be further enhanced when the meat-processing plant is completed, Rainforest, which is the leading producer and distributor of seafood and marine delicacies in the region, has dropped the wording ‘seafoods’ from its name.