Jamaica is hoping that the recent partnership initiative involving the island’s Scientific Research Council (SRC) and its food-manufacturing giant, Grace Kennedy to broaden the range of food items developed from local agricultural produce will both increase the range of options for local food consumers and its market share on North American and other markets.
The SRC has set a target of the end of the current financial year as the time frame for having new products coming out of the collaborative initiative between itself and Grace Kennedy, a standout Caribbean food distribution company that has enjoyed unique success on the US market. SRC says that the two have already begun to explore a number of new ideas for the manufacture of new food products.
The collaborative initiative is proceeding under a three-year Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) signed earlier this month and which seeks to improve the quality and quantity of food products through the application of science and technology solutions.
The initiative coincides with additional challenges confronting the wider regional food manufacturing industry in the wake of the passage of the Food Safety Modernization Act in the US which seeks to significantly raise quality control standards associated with foods being imported into the United States. Intensified intra-regional discussions on raising food safety standards and applying science and technology to agro processing have taken place as a facet of a broader discourse on regional food security and increasing food exports in the face of increased global demand though no meaningful steps are known to have been recorded so far at the level of the Caribbean Community.
Beyond new agro-processed products, the SRC/Grace Kennedy initiative also seeks to create a number of products that will target the health and wellness market, the SRC’s Executive Director Dr Cliff Riley was quoted as saying.
“There is a growing demand for functional foods… so that people not only have a bellyful and have enough calories to produce energy, but that whatever they consume has some other long-term benefits in terms of overall health,” Riley is quoted in sections of the Jamaican media as saying. The SRC says it sees the agreement as a positive development for the state-owned research institution that could have a global impact on functional foods and convenience foods
The new SRC/Grace Kennedy initiative coincides with the disclosure by the Jamaica Agro-Processors Association (JAPA) earlier this month that it wants local farmers to focus more effort on increasing the production of the local variety of red pepper at commercially viable levels as both raw material for the agro-processing sector and for export as a primary product to compete with the traditional West Indian red pepper. JAPA is quoted as saying that Trinidad and Tobago produces approximately 40,000 to 50,000 pounds per acre of West Indian red pepper while Jamaica yields 25,000 to 30,000 pounds of pepper per acre.
