The Tribune

By YOURI KEMP

Tribune Business Reporter

ykemp@tribunemedia.net

An Abaco jam and preservative maker needs $80,000 for a new machine to scale-up production and is lamenting the lack of support for Family Island businesses.

Theresa Pinder, owner/operator of Abaco Delights, told Tribune Business she has been making jams from natural fruits for more than 10 years now to the point where she sells three cases per month to most of the large supermarkets in Nassau.

She said: “What I sell really varies because everything I make is local, and I tend to keep all of the popular ones on hand so I don’t run out of them. But the food stores carry probably three to four cases, depending on the flavours, once every six weeks.”

Hurricane Dorian’s devastation forced Ms Pinder to “start all over again”. She added: “The price of everything is killing me because I’m telling you, as a small business, I’m trying hard trying to continue it because it’s really difficult. For small businesses it is extremely difficult to stay in business.”

Besides inflation and ever-increasing operating costs, Ms Pinder says this has a knock-on effect on prices for her products. She complained that some stores are pricing her jams too high where they are “pricing me out of the market for the foreign jams that are coming in”.

A standard 380ml jar of Abaco Delights jam is sold to grocery stores at $60 for the case, with the retailer then imposing its own mark-up. “They should not be selling my jam for the price they have it at. That’s just my opinion,” Ms Pinder said.

“You know what’s extremely outrageous? The cost to bring in foreign jams is much cheaper than making it locally because of all of the things I have to purchase. When I sell to stores in Nassau, I sell it for much cheaper in order to get it into that market.

“You have to go cheaper because you have freight and everything twice, because you have to pay to get the packaging in, and then you have to pay to send the finished product back out again and ship it.”

In order to scale up, Abaco Delights needs “at minimum” an $80,000 jam mixer once import duties and VAT are factored in alongside the landed cost.

Ms Pinder said the likes of the Small Business Development Centre (SBDC) and the Bahamas Entrepreneurial Venture Fund are “not into older people” when it comes to financing entrepreneurs. “When they do have grants or other offers up, they gear them towards teenagers and people in their 20s,” she added.

“I was looking for funding before I turned 65, and even then some of these places were not ready to support a small business on the Family Island.”