Eu­rope is a thriv­ing mar­ket that con­tin­ues to beck­on more and more lo­cal com­pa­nies to ex­port their goods and ser­vices to that part of the world.

Karibbean Flavours with its wide as­sort­ment of sea­son­ings and sauces and Kairi Choco­lates of­fer­ing home grown choco­lates are two such en­ti­ties which have their eyes set on Eu­rope.

They were among 20 goods and ser­vices com­pa­nies that took part in the Fit 4 Eu­rope II ini­tia­tive, which fo­cussed on en­hanc­ing the ex­port-readi­ness of T&T’s busi­ness­es, with par­tic­u­lar em­pha­sis on im­prov­ing their in­ter­na­tion­al com­pet­i­tive­ness for the EU mar­ket.

Fit 4 Eu­rope II is be­ing su­per­vised by the Caribbean De­vel­op­ment Bank’s Eco­nom­ic Part­ner­ship Agree­ment and Cari­com Sin­gle Mar­ket and Econ­o­my Stand­by Fa­cil­i­ty for Ca­pac­i­ty Build­ing, which is fund­ed by the Eu­ro­pean Union.

At the clos­ing cer­e­mo­ny of Fit 4 Eu­rope II last Mon­day, Min­is­ter of Trade and In­dus­try, Paula Gopee-Scoon, out­lined the ben­e­fits of the ini­tia­tive.

That was the cul­mi­na­tion of the sec­ond in­stal­ment of a €161,590 project de­signed to pre­pare T&T ex­porters to ven­ture in­to new mar­kets, ex­pand their busi­ness foot­print in the EU specif­i­cal­ly Ger­many and Swe­den, and in­crease their for­eign ex­change earn­ings.

In 2022, T&T’s ex­ports to the Eu­ro­pean Union (EU) to­talled US$5.88 bil­lion, ac­cord­ing to the Unit­ed Na­tions COM­TRADE data­base on in­ter­na­tion­al trade.

Of T&T’s ex­ports to the EU of US$5.88 bil­lion, min­er­al fu­els, oils, dis­til­la­tion prod­ucts alone ac­count­ed for US$3.88 bil­lion. In­or­gan­ic chem­i­cals, pre­cious met­al com­pounds and iso­topes ran a dis­tant sec­ond at US$684.23 mil­lion and or­gan­ic chem­i­cals round­ing out the top three ex­ports at ap­prox­i­mate­ly US$639 mil­lion.

Fer­tilis­ers were T&T’s fourth largest ex­port at al­most US$440 mil­lion.

Fit 4 Eu­rope II is an ini­tia­tive to en­cour­age the fur­ther growth of ex­ports from the lo­cal non-en­er­gy and ser­vices sec­tors.

Karibbean Flavours

The Sun­day Busi­ness Guardian spoke to Karibbean Flavours-a brand of RHS Mar­ket­ing Ltd- and Kairi Choco­lates about their re­spec­tive vi­sions.

RHS Mar­ket­ing Ltd is a proces­sor and dis­trib­u­tor of pre­mi­um qual­i­ty sauces, sea­son­ings, spices, condi­ments, seamoss drink, jel­lies, fruit cor­dials and essences in Trinidad.

The Karibbean Flavours brand was in­tro­duced in 1996, and is one of the best known and lead­ing brands in the Caribbean with prod­ucts be­ing sold through na­tion­al gro­cery chains, ho­tels and restau­rants.

The prod­ucts are ex­port­ed to the Caribbean Is­lands, Unit­ed States of Amer­i­ca, Cana­da and Eng­land and main­tain a strong pres­ence with the var­i­ous di­as­po­ra com­mu­ni­ties, ex­plained Arune Ma­haraj, the ex­port de­vel­op­ment man­ag­er for RHS mar­ket­ing.

Now, with Eu­rope in sight, Ma­haraj said, “We re­cent­ly start­ed to do dis­trib­u­tor­ship with a com­pa­ny in the UK, so we have start­ed to go to that hemi­sphere to broad­en that hori­zon.

“We still have some re­search to do to ex­pand out of the UK but, with the Fit 4 Eu­rope II project, that gave us some av­enues to work with.”

Ma­haraj al­so de­tailed oth­er plans, in­clud­ing get­ting in­to Ja­maica and Cen­tral Amer­i­ca name­ly Co­lum­bia and Pana­ma, in the first quar­ter of 2025.

In ex­plain­ing the de­ci­sion to en­ter Cen­tral Amer­i­ca, he said, “We have a lot of prod­ucts that would com­ple­ment that mar­ket, which would be our spices like those in the dry line and hot sauces.”

Thus far, he said, the com­pa­ny’s strongest ex­port mar­ket is Bar­ba­dos due to the month­ly vol­ume of ex­ports, which amount to at least four con­tain­ers com­pris­ing a mul­ti­tude of prod­ucts with ketchup and bar­be­cue sauce be­ing top con­tenders.

In gen­er­al, the most pop­u­lar sea­son­ings re­main its all-pur­pose, com­plete, chick­en, lemon pep­per and jerk with the com­pa­ny con­tin­u­ing to ex­port in ex­cess of about 15 con­tain­ers per month of these items and and many oth­ers to re­gion­al and in­ter­na­tion­al ter­ri­to­ries.

Kairi Choco­late

Pro­duc­ing blos­som to bar, hand­craft­ed, mi­cro­batch choco­lates with the nat­ur­al and unique flavour of Trinidad Trini­tario co­coa from La Car­lota Es­tate-a 100 plus year-old fam­i­ly es­tate farm-is at the heart of Kairi Choco­late.

Hus­band and wife team De­osaran Ja­groo and Cherie Anne Ram­lakhan, who are be­hind the five year-old com­pa­ny, al­so par­tic­i­pat­ed in the Fit 4 Eu­rope II pro­gramme. They at­test­ed to the fact that the pro­gramme has pro­vid­ed in­valu­able in­sights in help­ing them pave the way for­ward.

He shared that cer­tain things have to be put in place such as ob­tain­ing the nec­es­sary cer­ti­fi­ca­tion and sat­is­fy­ing all the reg­u­la­tions to en­sure their prod­ucts can en­ter the Eu­ro­pean mar­ket.

The com­pa­ny pro­duces about 500 bars a month, of­fer­ing sev­en dif­fer­ent choco­late bars as well as ve­g­an op­tions us­ing plan­tain and chick peas as a milk re­plac­er.

It al­so makes hot choco­late sticks.

Kairi Choco­late’s prod­ucts are dark choco­late based; 50 per cent and more and about 20 per cent of pro­duc­tion is sold lo­cal­ly.

“It’s not the nor­mal sweet, milk choco­late and so the mar­ket for that is very small and in Trinidad it is about one per cent and there are sev­er­al choco­late mak­ers so it’s al­so pret­ty sat­u­rat­ed but we have been able to iden­ti­fy a small part of that mar­ket through our dis­trib­u­tors and pro­mot­ers,” Ja­groo said, adding that the com­pa­ny ex­ports about 25 per cent of its pro­duc­tion to Cana­da and the US and hopes to get in­to Eu­rope, start­ing with the UK and then get­ting in­to Italy, Hol­land and Switzer­land.

“With the Fit 4 Eu­rope II project we had meet­ings with po­ten­tial buy­ers with­in the past few months and soon things will start to ma­te­ri­alise,” Ram­lakhan, who is the brain be­hind the choco­late-mak­ing, said.

The founders of Kairi Choco­late al­so said the com­pa­ny is com­mit­ted to main­tain­ing the eco­log­i­cal in­tegri­ty of the prod­uct, com­pris­ing re­spect for the land, the preser­va­tion of lo­cal wildlife, a re­duc­tion of its car­bon foot­print and en­sur­ing best prac­tices in the field and post-har­vest op­er­a­tions.

The com­pa­ny re­ceived its sec­ond year of recog­ni­tion from the Acad­e­my of Choco­late 2022 Awards, bring­ing T&T to an in­ter­na­tion­al­ly ac­claimed au­di­ence.

Fran­ka Costel­loe, chair of the T&T Trade and In­vest­ment Pro­mo­tion Agency, ex­plained that Fit 4 Eu­rope II ad­dressed two crit­i­cal bar­ri­ers to ex­port growth—the lack of mar­ket in­tel­li­gence and the dif­fi­cul­ty in meet­ing in­ter­na­tion­al qual­i­ty stan­dards.

She said many com­pa­nies were un­fa­mil­iar with the EU mar­ket’s nu­ances, such as pack­ag­ing re­quire­ments, con­sumer pref­er­ences, and lo­gis­tics, adding that com­pli­ance with manda­to­ry and vol­un­tary stan­dards in var­i­ous EU coun­tries was a sig­nif­i­cant chal­lenge.

“This phase al­so in­clud­ed a vir­tu­al trade mis­sion tar­get­ing com­pa­nies that were ready for ex­port, with Swe­den and Ger­many iden­ti­fied as key mar­kets. Over the course of 15 months, Mar­ket Scop­ing In­ter­na­tion­al (MSI) worked close­ly with se­lect­ed com­pa­nies, of­fer­ing one-on-one coach­ing, train­ing, and ca­pac­i­ty-build­ing sup­port to help them bet­ter un­der­stand and nav­i­gate in­ter­na­tion­al mar­kets,” Con­stel­loe said.

She fur­ther not­ed that an im­por­tant as­pect of Fit 4 Eu­rope II was the cre­ation of a com­mu­ni­ty among par­tic­i­pat­ing com­pa­nies, stat­ing that this col­lab­o­ra­tive en­vi­ron­ment fos­tered the ex­change of ex­per­tise and in­sights across com­pa­nies of vary­ing sizes and stages of ex­port de­vel­op­ment—help­ing each of them grow and com­pete more ef­fec­tive­ly on the in­ter­na­tion­al stage.

The first it­er­a­tion of Fit 4 Eu­rope, known as Fit 4 Eu­rope I, fo­cused on build­ing the ca­pac­i­ty of lo­cal en­ter­pris­es, ed­u­cat­ing stake­hold­ers on EU mar­ket ac­cess, and es­tab­lish­ing strate­gic part­ner­ships.

It iden­ti­fied 26 com­pa­nies with sig­nif­i­cant ex­port po­ten­tial and tar­get­ed mar­kets in­clud­ing the Unit­ed King­dom, the Nether­lands, and France. No­tably, the project em­pha­sised in­clu­sive growth, with par­tic­u­lar at­ten­tion to gen­der, and tar­get­ed key sec­tors such as food and bev­er­age, fash­ion de­sign, and cos­met­ics.

Fur­ther, Am­bas­sador Ex­tra­or­di­nary and Plenipo­ten­tiary Del­e­ga­tion of the Eu­ro­pean Union Pe­ter Cavendish said the ini­tia­tive has pro­mot­ed in­clu­siv­i­ty by sup­port­ing di­verse busi­ness­es, in­clud­ing those led by women, and has em­pha­sised sus­tain­able prac­tices, align­ing with the EU’s green com­mit­ments.