Mandeville, Manchester – For decades it has annoyed and irritated Tony Freckleton – an itch that won’t go away.

Why, he wondered, should the communities of the so-called bread-basket areas of South St Elizabeth and South Manchester be unable to benefit from the profitable value-added aspects of agriculture?

“Why is it we don’t have a beverage company in the bread-basket? Why we don’t have any jerk sauce company? Why we don’t have any cosmetics from our local produce? .we only doing the hard work, growing the crops, and we not making the money,” said Freckleton, as he tried to transmit the essence of his passion to journalists recently.

Now five years after the formulation of his Jamaica Exotic Flavours and Essences (JEFE) project in Bull Savannah, South St Elizabeth, Freckleton and farmers in surrounding communities have an extra pep in their step.

The JEFE factory, with a staff of 12, is now in its commercial phase, providing water melon, cucumber and mango puree for GraceKennedy’s popular Tropical Rhythms line of drinks.

“This is going to transform our agriculture,” said a starry-eyed Freckleton last month as he proudly examined a bottle of Melon Delight – described on the label as ‘a delicate blend of sumptuous Caribbean passion fruit and succulent water melon . the ideal thirst quencher’. It was part of the first batch of 1,500 cases of Melon Delight produced from JEFE’s puree.

Edgar Stone, procurement manager at GraceKennedy Foods, said his company was delighted by the developments in Bull Savannah which could have the long-term effect of reducing the dependence on imported puree for the company’s product line.

“If there is an opportunity to get products locally, that is our first choice,” said Stone.

The reputed superior quality of the Jamaican flavour is an added incentive for GraceKennedy.

“It is an absolute fact that Jamaican products taste better . there is a different flavour, the taste is different and far superior to others,” said Melissa March, GraceKennedy’s product development manager.

For Freckleton, the sky is the limit. From the modest start, firstly with water melons and cucumbers in March and April, followed by mangoes in May as the fruit season takes hold, he envisages over time to go to flavour extraction of a range of other products.

His long-term vision is of a “Silicon Valley-type operation” for food/drink processing as well as essence/fragrance extraction in South St Elizabeth providing a thriving market for farmers and direct employment for thousands of people.

The recent start up of the commercial phase follows an 18-month period of meticulous preparation in collaboration with agro-processors, involving the experimental production of purees and flavours. Water melon, cucumber and mango apart, the purees and flavours that have been tested with positive results include june plum, lemon grass, carrot, tomato, escallion, scotch bonnet pepper, sorrel, ginger, coffee.

JEFE’s sample products have generated interest far and wide with Firmenich, a world-leading manufacturer of fragrances and flavours showing strong interest in the water melon.

“We have signed a technical agreement and they are now waiting for us,” said Freckleton.

But the priority, according to Freckleton, will be for JEFE to establish itself first before venturing away from home.

“The mistake that some local agro processors have made in the past is to ignore the local market for the export market,” he said. “The problem is that if you make a mess of your name in the international market you won’t get it back.

“So we are going to tek care a yard before we go abroad. We are going to mop up the local market first as best we can. we want to, overtime, build economies of scale. We want to get to 3,000 acres of land dedicated to (processing) and then we can say to anyone around the world we are ready for you,” he said.

The JEFE factory, centrally located in Bull Savannah, constitutes a refurbishment of a warehouse that originally belonged to Southern Foods. It is the centrepiece of a US$1-million project that has as its principal shareholders, the Jamaican Government, Freckleton as managing director, and farmers.

Much of the initial investment has gone into the equipping of the factory, including the installation of a state-of-the-art flavour and essence extractor described as a Spinning Cone Column flavour extractor which is at the heart of JEFE’s production processes.

Help has come from diverse sources, including the European Union, through its private sector development programme, the Dutch Government, which assisted the development of a business plan, and the former Trafalgar Development Bank.

Crucial to success will be consistency of supply from farmers.

A contract has been developed initially with 106 farmers in the Bacon/Little Park Water Users Group with access to a steady supply of irrigation water, gained just two years ago. The plan is to move to a resource base of 500 farmers, over time.

The initial group have gained favour because of access to water. “This has to be linked to irrigation because the problem with sustaining anything like this is that we have periods of drought, long periods of drought that in the past have determined production. Irrigation allows us to get past that and develop consistency of production,” said Freckleton.

The reality of disasters such as hurricanes influenced planners to focus on melons and cucumbers as staple crops.

“If hurricane comes (melon and cucumber farmers) can brush off themselves and get back into production,” he explained. “If we depend heavily on tree crops, you going to have to wait a hell of a time.”

Freckleton insists that current arrangements with farmers mean consistency of production will be maintained. Part and parcel of a package deal with the farmers is a minimum level of profit, micro-financing arrangements that will allow funding without collateral, specially negotiated discounted fertiliser prices and a business model that will allow a 25 per cent shareholding of the project by the farmers themselves.

It’s early days, but farmer Seymour Simpson, an executive of the Bacon/Little Park Water Users Scheme, is already pointing to one major benefit of the JEFE project. “Melon farmers use to lose 30 per cent of the crop to waste, because nobody want the small fruit. Now, the factory tek everything for the processing operation. Nothing waste,” he told the Observer.

For the immediate future, Freckleton sees the development of tomato paste for the ketchup manufacturing market as a key area of production.

He argued that the price of imported tomato paste is “going to triple by November” as global food prices rocket. The tomato farmers of Southern St Elizabeth and Manchester can join the trade with efficient production methods that could see them reaping 65,000 pounds of the crop per acre, he said.

It’s all part of a grand design that Freckleton dreams will one day take his production line from one level to the next: not just the food and drink industry but “producing essences for cosmetics, shampoos, body wash, the entire spectrum”.

“We have the advantage whereby our aromas, our fragrances, our flavours are of a higher quality than the rest of the world,” said Freckleton. “So how we can sit down and allow millions of tons of fruit and vegetables to go to waste in this country every year and then import from Brazil and elsewhere.?”