The Stabroek Business had met with Dianna Powell more than five years ago, back in 2017, after she had launched her Pleasurable Flavors brand. Birthed in her home at 64 Self Help Scheme, Amelia’s Ward, Linden, the investment had been undertaken in an effort to help meet the cost of her daughter’s tuition in Canada. Circumstances, however, dictated that that ambition be set aside. Six years later, Pleasurable Favors has persisted and so has Diana’s daughter Juanita’s ambition to pursue a university education. She is currently reading for a degree in architecture at the University of Guyana. Today, with the end of 2022 fast approaching, Dianna believes that Pleasurable Flavors is beginning to attract a pleasing level of consumer attention. She has, however, become acutely aware of the fact that the agro-processing sector is not still without its considerable challenges. Her own pleasing interludes have been interspersed with setbacks and disappointments.
The complexities associated with negotiating with suppliers of raw materials, mostly peppers, and the demands associated with creating an effective marketing strategy have persuaded her that a point has now been reached where she may well need serious professional support if her business is to grow. If initial success had derived mostly from neighbourhood patronage, competing at a wider level against formidable competition was an altogether different matter. Her own product, she decided, had to be equipped with a competitive edge.
This was realised through a bold move of ‘throwing in’ other fruit into the ‘affray’ – ginger, lime, mango, papaw, cucumber, carilla, bilimbi, and tamarind were her chosen fruits – the idea being to bring different tastes/flavours to the product without having it drift away from the marketed idea. If the experiment served to create considerable further market approval, other concerns arose. Exposure to a wider range of local and imported agro-produce has persuaded Diana that her own packaging, mostly ‘regular’ 200ml plastic bottles employed in the bottling of alcohol simply couldn’t ‘cut it.’ Through a loan from the Small Business Bureau she was able to offer more attractive containers for her pepper sauces. More challenges lay ahead, however. Improvements in the image of the country’s retail sector saw the emergence of significantly scaled up supermarkets that sought to have the appearance of the products that they stocked, match the ambience of their new business places. Diana soon learnt that if the Pleasurable Flavors brand was to be worthy of a place on the shelves of the upgraded local supermarkets, she needed to ‘up her game’ even further. Accordingly, she moved to engage the Government Analyst-Food & Drug Department (GAFDD) and the Guyana National Bureau of Standards (GNBS) in order to secure product certification from these state agencies.
In 2016 she secured shelf space for her products at the state-run Guyana Shop.
Rest assured, incremental success did not cause Pleasurable Flavors to rest on its laurels. Over time, what has come to be regarded as one of the fastest growing agro-processing entities in the country has added a further range of products to its brand including green seasoning, tamarind balls, relish, fruit mix, and Shake-it-Up, a seasoned coating that can be used to fry chicken or fish.
If there is a challenge that Pleasurable Flavors is yet to overcome, it is that of continually securing a reliable supply of raw materials for what is now a considerable range of products. Her engagements with farmers in Linden have thrown up challenges that include supply reliability issues as well as price considerations. Offers to the farmers by the Regional Democratic Council to provide them with seedlings have yielded no positive results.
Diana’s present production requirements means that she has to secure 1,000 pounds of pepper weekly. That, it seems, has been too demanding a target for the farmers at Linden. An unreliable raw material supply regime has meant that she has had to place her export market ambitions ‘on hold.
Some time ago Diana began the process of applying for a plot of Linden in order to ‘try her hand’ at undertaking an independent agricultural initiative. That apart, there is, as well, the current challenge of further upgrading her product packaging to meet the ever-growing demands of both the local and international markets.
Back in August Diana made an appearance at the August 19-21 Agro Fest in Trinidad and Tobago. The primary purpose of her mission, she said, was to seek to secure one or more distributors for her products in what she believed was a potentially lucrative market. While she was unable to realise that goal, a measure of compensation came in the form of the successful marketing of her Shake-it-Up seasoning product. She is the recipient of a US$30,000 grant which she won that will assist in scaling up her operation and exporting her product, Shake-it-Up.
In the instance of Diana Powell, fortune has favoured the brave. In June last year her determination led her to the USAID-funded Economic Development Accelerator (EDA) programme which had been set up as a platform to assist emerging agro-processing enterprises in Guyana. EDA was seeking to provide meaningful support to at least five agro-processors through significant capital contributions that would facilitate business expansion targeting the export market. Guyanese agro-processors manufacturing sauces, seasonings, and other foods were encouraged to engage with the EDA. The organisation staged a “Business Bootcamp” where participants benefitted from access to international industry experts, workshops, as well as one-on-one coaching in disciplines associated with product manufacturing and aspects of entrepreneurship among others. Through a process of elimination, five agro-processors including Diana were afforded the US$30,000 grant. She disclosed that part of the grant was used to further upgrade the quality of her product presentation.
Effective distribution remains one of her primary concerns. She believes there is room for energetic and dedicated distributors who are prepared to spread the agro-processing message across the country, a pursuit which she believes will ‘free up agro-processors to “do what they do best.”
While product promotion is, in some measure, part of the responsibility of the state-run Guyana Marketing Corporation (GMC), the success which the agency has been able to realise in pursuit of this assignment is difficult to measure since there is no sustained flow of information to the public in this regard. While a collaborative product promotion event involving the GMC and a Massy Supermarket retail outlet had been held several weeks ago, no information has been placed in the public domain with regard to any planned follow-up to this initiative. Determined, it seems, not to allow Pleasurable Flavors to fall victim to the constraints that continue to affect the local agro-processing sector, Diana recently embarked on yet another mission outside the country in pursuit of an agent whom she believes would ‘push’ her products. She is, she says, abundantly confident in the potential of her products to please the market, both regionally and extra-regionally.
