The Guyana Marketing Corporation’s (GMC) consumer outlet, the Guyana Shop, currently offers consumers more than 700 locally manufactured products at its Robb and Alexander streets location, according to the shop’s General Manager Kevin Macklingam.
The products currently available include patent medicines, food condiments, spices and colourings, soaps, wines and beverages.
Macklingam told Stabroek Business that the Guyana Shop, which also supports small local manufacturers
in the areas of product preparation, labelling and packaging, added more than 60 new locally manufactured items to its product range last year. He highlighted its role in promoting locally manufactured goods, at home and abroad.
The Guyana Shop’s product range is acquired from manufacturers across the country, though the General Manager said that there were logistical and transportation-related challenges associated with receiving regular and reliable supplies of some goods from interior locations. He said those challenges had to do mostly with the reliability of transportation schedules from some interior locations but avenues were currently being explored that might enable the storage of larger quantities of some product in Georgetown in order to minimise shortages.
The GMC, meanwhile, is in the process of executing a mandate given it by Agriculture Minister Dr Leslie Ramsammy to expand the services provided by the Guyana Shop. Macklingam said that while the plan did not, in the short term, envisage the opening of other similar outlets, discourses were already underway with supermarkets in Berbice with a view to having the locally manufactured products placed on their shelves. Essequibo and Linden have also been targeted for discussion with retailers who are prepared to support the drive to promote locally manufactured items in their communities.
“Actually, we are quite pleased with the responses we have received. More than that we believe that the opportunities that are now being afforded to display locally manufactured products alongside imported products could actually have the effect of improving our own product presentation,” Macklingam said.
Up to 40 of the 60 products placed on the shelves of the Guyana Shop last year were received during the first six months, a sign, the manager said, that local small manufacturing enterprises were on the increase.
Products accepted by the Guyana Shop are expected to meet certain minimum production standards which require, among other things that the Ministry of Health’s Food and Drugs Department certify the suitability of the conditions under which the products are manufactured.
Meanwhile, Macklingam told Stabroek Business that locally manufactured products continued to enjoy the support of sections of the overseas market last year. He said that information available to the GMC suggests that several locally produced items continued to be popular with markets in the region, though he added that as far as export to Trinidad and Tobago was concerned, there were “issues with non-tariff barriers”.
