Her youthfulness belies the focus and confidence with which she talks about her “business ambitions,” her determination to transform her fledgling entrepreneurial pursuits into “something big” – something that can challenge and eventually replace imported agro-produce that have long been fixtures on local supermarket shelves – and which she has come to see as choking off the market growth of locally produced options waiting impatiently to take what she considers to be their rightful places.
At 21, Kelshine Griffith comes across as having somewhat different priorities to many young women in her own age group. Having just completed the 2018-2019 agro-processing course at the Guyana School of Agriculture, her immediate priority is to transform her end-of-course practical assignment – a Sweet Potato Cake Mix with which she aims to challenge the legendary Betty Crocker brand on the local market – into a countrywide household product.
There is a catchiness to the brand name SHINE, sculpted off the latter part of her own christian name and though the packaging that displays the product is clearly in need of some measure of refinement (a fact which she readily acknowledges), there is no bridling her ‘talking up’ of the product itself.
Up until now, Kelshine’s Sweet Potato Cake Mix is the sole manifestation of her wider agro-processing ambition, that is, if you discount what she says are her plans down the road, to look seriously at substantive agriculture as a way of securing control over her raw material supplies.
Kelshine’s current pursuit of agro-processing derives from a broader ambition to move beyond the years at secondary school that had brought modest returns; so that our conversation ambled beyond her Sweet Potato Cake Mix and into other realms…like the fact that her agro-processing ambitions have already seen her complete a formal course in the discipline, an experience which she says, has deepened her understanding of the manufacturing process; and after we had exhausted that discourse we spoke about her bee-keeping pursuits which have already made her part of yet another entrepreneurial venture, her self-sufficiency in greens, the result of a thriving kitchen garden at her aunt’s Tucville home where she resides and what she says is her long wait for a response to an application which she has made for a modest plot of state land on which she intends to create a farm of her own.
It’s hard to overlook not just the impressive sense of order to her priorities but her acute understanding of the mountain that she must climb if she is to succeed. Her immediate priority is to press the Sweet Potato Cake Mix into service as a kind of base on which to erect her greater ambitions; so that she is currently seeking to significantly upgrade the packaging of the product, hardly flinching when she says that the best prices she has gotten so far for 50 well turned-out packages is $24,000, a cost that is almost certain to devour much of her returns.
Simultaneously, Kelshine is focussed on the requirements of becoming a bona fide businesswomen in the agro processing sector so that she talks confidently about her current engagement in registering a business including engagements with the Guyana Revenue Authority and her inevitable encounter with the Government Analyst-Food & Drug Department, a hurdle that she must still clear if her Cake Mix is to make it to market.
For the moment, that ambition is limited to meeting the requirements for acceptance on the shelves of the Guyana Marketing Corporation’s Guyana Shop, which, over time, has gradually become a kind of testing ground for local agro-produce. All of this, Kelshine says, is intended to serve as a trial run for the more ambitious excursion into real entrepreneurship.
There are concerns too…like, she says, having to do business in an environment in which a conservative banking sector continues to avoid such ‘risky ventures’ like agro-processing startups like the proverbial plague and where there are few adequate compensatory funding mechanisms and really none at all beyond a willing but underfunded Small Business Bureau.
There is the as yet, far from realised ambition of creating her own factory in the absence of which her product production pursuits are undertaken utilising the facilities of the Guyana School of Agriculture, for which she has to pay a fee. A commercial blender, she says, could set you back upwards of $150,000 while a mill that can adequately perform commercial agro-processing functions can cost around $300,000. Kelshine’s conclusions are clinical. If local agro-processing is to survive and prosper at the small and medium sized levels, then in the interim at least, it will be necessary for state funding to be pumped into the creation of a manufacturing facility to which small agro-processors will have access at a manageable cost.
Her focus, she says, is on continually upgrading her agro-processing skills, refining her knowledge of the business environment in which she operates and cultivating the raw materials for transformation into agro-produce. This means that she must constantly broaden her knowledge base on the business of agro-processing which she does by mostly resorting to the internet. At some stage too she must re-engage with the authorities on her land acquisition application whilst simultaneously embarking on a diligent initiative not just to broaden her product base but also to ensure that her production pursuits are attended by a correspondingly robust marketing exercise.
There is sense in which this slight 21-year-old has the effect of restoring faith in youth. Not once does she falter when you probe her ambitions and even when you think her point is made she throws at you, something else that is important. Down the road her business instincts are almost certain to make her a serious attention-getter.
