With little more than an entrepreneurial instinct and a passion for turning whatever local fruit ‘fits the bill’ into a dehydrated condiment, 28-year-old Adaiah Fyffe has convinced himself that what started as no more than a likeness for that kind of experimentation, has grown into a conviction that it take him to a breakthrough both here in Guyana and perhaps elsewhere in the region.
His ‘weakness’ reposes in his impatience to grow demand for his dehydrated sweet fruit (pineapple is the only one that we have tasted so far) into a household snack product. It is a disposition that tends to ‘blind’ him somewhat to the hurdles that he will have to cross if he is to get to where he wants to go.
Dehydrated fruit snacks are created through a process that extracts the moisture from fresh fruit by either placing the fruit in the sun or by placing it in a dehydrator or oven. What the dehydration process does is to concentrate the natural sugars in the fruit. Once the fruit is dehydrated it can be cut into smaller pieces and enjoyed as a ‘chewy’ healthy snack.
Adaiah has already made a relatively pleasing degree of progress with his entrepreneurial pursuit, the ‘repeat orders’ that he already enjoys with Mattai’s, one of the larger supermarkets in Georgetown, serving to persuade him that there are people out there who enjoy what he is offering.
Wild Rupununi, the name of his company, is as miniscule as they come. He functions as what is commonly referred to as a ‘one-man show,’ a Jack-of-all trades, if you will. He alone makes all of the business decisions, ranging from the purchase of fruit with which to produce his end product to the correlation of cost-effectiveness and customer appeal. Packaging, labelling and marketing (which is basically about pounding the streets in search of markets) all fall within his list of responsibilities.
Unquestionably, Adaiah’s standout features are his seemingly unchanging good humour and his seeming consummate faith in his business pursuit. That said, it would be absurd to suggest that with unbridled optimism not being the sole criterion for success in pursuits such as his, an injection of some element of both business training and carefully targeted financing would help.
With continuity depending critically on cash flow, Adaiah is currently in the process of seeking to cash in on the spirit of Christmas, knocking on doors, seeking to take advantage of seasonal purchases and hoping that his search for support in pursuit of his modest entrepreneurial venture will bear fruit.
Over time, the sun-drying of fruits and vegetables has been practiced widely in the Caribbean, taking advantage of generous sunshine, though increasing rainfall here in the region has given rise to the use of modern dehydrators to perform the process.
