From sideshow events at local fairs and exhibitions, small and micro enterprise agro processing has become a popular pursuit among mostly women seeking second incomes or those determined to embrace the processing of fruit and vegetables as a means of building modest but successful businesses.
Marva Hestick is a retired headmistress whose entrepreneurial spirit predates her retirement from the teaching profession. Entrepreneurship, she says, has always been in her blood, her grandfather having once owned a coconut oil factory. It is this, she believes, that might have led her to pioneer Alpha Agro Processors and to want to take it as far as she can.
The enterprise is still to come even close to the level of success to which it aspires, but Hestick and the four other investors in Alpha appear to have a clear vision of where they want to take the venture. She says they continue to seek out marketing opportunities both through the customary commercial outlets and through initiatives that take them directly to potential customers. This weekend they are bringing their products to the city, hoping to attract attention among shoppers by setting up stall on the downtown Georgetown pavement, outside Republic Bank.
The venture started just over a year ago and Hestick’s primary success up to this time would appear to be that she has triggered a spirit of entrepreneurship amongst a small group of women in Crane. This week she brought Alpha’s products—pepper sauce, green seasoning and tropical sauce—to the Stabroek Business to make a case for their promotion in the paper.
They are presented in the same plastic bottles which many other local producers have pressed into service. The labels are neat without being exotic. On the basis of their appearance, the products would probably hold their own on any local supermarket shelf and Hestick says the Alpha range is already on display at the Guyana Marketing Corporation’s Guyana Shop. As with its competitors, however, Alpha is searching for ways of increasing its share of the market.
Interestingly, and at a time when commercial bank lending for micro projects like Alpha’s is the exception rather than the rule, the entity has already secured a $1 million loan from the Guyana Bank for Trade and Industry to finance its blenders and other equipment. And Hestick says Alpha is open to investments by other entrepreneurs. Growth, she says, has been a function of sound business decisions, including marketing initiatives that have seen Alpha’s products reach interior areas and shrewd negotiations that have resulted in securing fruit and vegetables for processing at good prices.
At Crane where Alpha products are manufactured the example of Alpha has energized a small group of women in the community, who are lobbying for the creation of a cooperative. Hestick endorses the idea and would even be a part of it but says she wants to sustain Alpha as a separate private entity.
