One of the hugely encouraging developments in the local small-business sector has been the emergence of modest, women-led agro-processing enterprises that realise an impressive array of new products, which gradually, are beginning to alter the faces of our supermarket shelves. Lest it appear that we are getting ahead of ourselves it should be made clear that the historic proclivity of the Guyanese consumer for imported condiments and other agro-produce continues to be manifested in the imports of the new generation of supermarkets and other food distribution outlets. However much we resist the reality, the stubborn persistence of the foreign taste has defied what, over the years, has been the weak official efforts to break that pattern as manifested primarily in its largely unsuccessful ‘buy local’ pursuits that have been supported by little if any material support.
Amanda Hart would appear to be one of those aspiring Guyanese women who has been casting around for an entrepreneurial anchor. During an interview with the Stabroek Business last weekend she talked briefly about her ‘excursions’ into simply identifying, buying and selling, various types of consumer goods from which she could realise “a reasonable turnover.” Once those prospects had been exhausted she would move on.
On Saturday evening, during an interview with the Stabroek Business Amanda appeared to want the public to know that she may well have ‘struck gold,’ in terms of her entrepreneurial calling. A Gon Pickle-Yah is the decidedly ‘catchy’ brand name under which she is trading her pickled cucumbers and onions. The enterprise, she says, was revealed to her “in a dream.”
Pickles have long been an accustomed element in the Guyanese eating culture. Few if any Guyanese home are without one (or more) pickles intended to add an extra measure of ‘oomph’ to their meals. More than that, pickled fruit has long been one of the favourite picks of animated children salivating over the ‘Mango Lady’s’ tray outside the school premises.
Amanda’s ambitions for her pickles are considerably more exalted. She is daring to breach the walls of a culinary convention which, over time, had become indoctrinated by iconic names in the pickle industry, names like Vlasic, Kruger, Farmans, and Mount Olive. For the time being, however, she has both feet on the ground, content to continue to work towards the incremental refinement of the product on the one hand and on the other, piloting a course for its entry onto the local culinary stage through supportive channels.
Her marketing endeavours, she says, have secured the backing of Quincy Roach’s ‘Go Local Guyana’ pursuits and when it comes to jars-on-shelves she credits, among other establishments, the popular Bounty and Survival supermarkets as well as Rossignol Butchery and the Guyana Marketing Corporation’s Guyana Shop.
Sandwiched between the pursuits of product enhancement and product promotion is her full-time job as an insurance broker. If that commitment remains, for now at least, unaffected by her agro-processing preoccupations, you sense, somehow, that one preoccupation will outdo the other on her scale of priorities.