GEISHA KOW­LESSAR-ALON­ZO

Chief Ex­ec­u­tive Of­fi­cer (CEO) of the ma­jor­i­ty state-owned Na­tion­al Flour Mills (NFM), Ian Mitchell, is con­cerned about the on­go­ing glob­al trade wars which, he says, can pos­si­bly have an im­pact on the price of wheat that the com­pa­ny im­ports from North Amer­i­ca.

How­ev­er, he is as­sur­ing the NFM has con­tin­gency plans to mit­i­gate these fac­tors.

“We are con­cerned. Even if there are is­sues with trade be­tween the US and Mex­i­co, the US and Cana­da, the US and Eu­rope, there are op­tions for us to se­cure most of our grain out­side of the US if we have to.

“So we have to look at mit­i­ga­tion strate­gies to de­ter­mine how do we less the im­pact should the price of wheat or the avail­abil­i­ty of wheat be­come dif­fi­cult. And so we are look­ing at those op­tions. What I can as­sure you is we will find a way to en­sure that we have wheat to pro­duce the flour that the peo­ple of Trinidad and To­ba­go need,”

Mitchell spoke to the Busi­ness Guardian at the rib­bon-cut­ting cer­e­mo­ny on Tues­day for the com­pa­ny’s new $17.2 mil­lion 2 kilo­gram pack­ag­ing line which took place at NFM’s fa­cil­i­ty on Wright­son Road, Port-of-Spain.

Stat­ing that “no­body knows what’s go­ing to hap­pen,” Mitchell not­ed the price of grain has been fluc­tu­at­ing in re­cent time.

“So what we have done is we’ve tried to se­cure our next cou­ple ship­ments so we are pret­ty much in a sta­ble po­si­tion to take us through the mid­dle of this year,” Mitchell said, adding that the NFM’s ma­jor raw ma­te­ri­als are brought in from the US or North Amer­i­ca gen­er­al­ly, but for the most part, the US.

He main­tained that if the NFM can­not source its wheat from the US or if it be­comes dif­fi­cult or ex­pen­sive to do so, then Cana­da is al­ways an op­tion.

“Wheat is grown in many parts of the world. We don’t fore­see there will be a sit­u­a­tion with the avail­abil­i­ty of wheat to NFM.

“We will be able to find wheat. We have to look the cost of the wheat and we have to con­tin­ue to man­age and en­sure that we’re able to pro­duce at a cost that our cus­tomers can af­ford. But we are look­ing at all of the op­tions and the mit­i­ga­tion strate­gies,” Mitchell main­tained.

Re­gard­ing the sourc­ing of soy­abean and corn, Mitchell de­scribed those as “a lit­tle bit dif­fer­ent” as these items can im­port­ed from oth­er parts of the world, from non-tra­di­tion­al mar­kets.

“We have be­fore brought soy­bean meal, which is used in an­i­mal feed pro­duc­tion and corn, like­wise, an­i­mal feed pro­duc­tion. We have in the past brought those com­modi­ties from Brazil and South Amer­i­ca. So that op­tion al­ways re­mains open to us,” Mitchell added.

Rice mill com­ing

By the first quar­ter of this year, the NFM is hop­ing to mill and pack­age rice grown in T&T.

Mitchell was part of a del­e­ga­tion that vis­it­ed In­dia last year to dis­cuss col­lab­o­ra­tion with that coun­try re­gard­ing that par­tic­u­lar grain.

“Our in­ten­tion is to be ready to mill rice that is grown in T&T and, if nec­es­sary, to be able to pack­age rice that is brought from In­dia.

“...We’re cur­rent­ly work­ing on ways to help us get ei­ther pad­dy or un­pol­ished rice here in Trinidad that we can pro­duce on our mill,” he said, adding that the com­pa­ny al­so has been do­ing a lot of work with lo­cal rice farm­ers as well and the Min­istry of Agri­cul­ture.

He said that down pay­ments on equip­ment have al­ready been made.

On de­trac­tors say­ing that rice should be grown lo­cal­ly, Mitchell said the “phi­los­o­phy is build it and they will come.”

“So work is be­ing done. You will ap­pre­ci­ate if we in­vest in a rice mill, we need vol­umes or through­put through that mill to make it a vi­able in­vest­ment. So while the lo­cal agri­cul­tur­al sec­tor comes up to speed, it takes a while, more acreage will be as­signed. The yield is go­ing to im­prove year-on-year as farm­ers grow more and more rice. And so while that is hap­pen­ing, if we need to sup­ple­ment that with im­port­ed pad­dy or im­port­ed pol­ished rice we will do so to en­sure that the mill is prof­itable,” Mitchell stat­ed.

Fo­cus­ing on ex­ports

The new pack­ag­ing line will not see a re­duc­tion in staff, but rather in­ten­si­fies NFM’s strat­e­gy on in­creas­ing its ex­ports.

Mitchell said the NFM in­tends to pro­duce more of the types of prod­ucts that are re­quired, not just in T&T but in the wider re­gion.

There­fore, work­ers are crit­i­cal in achiev­ing this.

“We are go­ing to have a need for our em­ploy­ees be­cause we’re go­ing to have to run more shifts. We’re go­ing to have to pro­duce more. We’re go­ing to have to ex­port more. Up to re­cent­ly, we’ve start­ed do­ing a sig­nif­i­cant amount of ex­ports to Ja­maica.

“We may not have been able to do that if we did not in­vest in plant and new tech­nol­o­gy. There are a num­ber of oth­er prod­ucts we in­tend to start pro­duc­ing for that par­tic­u­lar dis­trib­u­tor that we’re work­ing with in Ja­maica and a num­ber of those prod­ucts are go­ing to come from the new tech­nol­o­gy that we’ve just in­stalled,” Mitchell said.

On plans for re­gion­al ex­pan­sion, Mitchell de­tailed that the NFM still has a “lit­tle bit of work” to do in Cari­com.

“I think we need to lock­down the Cari­com mar­ket for flour,” he added.

In its dog food prod­uct, which Mitchell re­ferred to “pet care,” the NFM chief ex­ec­u­tive said this con­tin­ues to do well not­ing that the NFM first be­gan ex­port­ing this to the African con­ti­nent.

“We want to try to grow the vol­umes there while re­al­ly lock­ing down some of the ter­ri­to­ries in Cari­com. There is go­ing to be some in­vest­ment in that area as well, which would al­low us to pro­duce dif­fer­ent types of dog food, that we al­ready have de­signs for and that we’re work­ing on. But pet care is a sig­nif­i­cant chunk of our growth,” Mitchell added.

New prod­ucts

With an al­ready wide range of prod­ucts, NFM cus­tomers can look for­ward to a va­ri­ety of pan­cake mix­es ex­pect­ed to come on­stream in the third quar­ter of this year.

This will be re­leased un­der the Lo­tus brand.

“We’ve test­ed the prod­uct and it is the most fan­tas­tic pan­cake prod­uct that I’ve tast­ed with my lim­it­ed ex­pe­ri­ence. And there are oth­er things that we have in mind in the pipeline, but those are a lit­tle fur­ther back in the pipeline, so I don’t want to share.

“What we want to do is bring the main­stream prod­ucts first. There are oth­er op­tions, for ex­am­ple a pan­cake mix with cas­sa­va flour and that sort of thing. So those things are al­so be­ing de­vel­oped, but when we ini­tial­ly launch it will be a few flavours of tra­di­tion­al pan­cake mix, but­ter­milk and that sort of thing,” Mitchell said.