It started eight years ago with Robin Lim Lumsden developing some recipes for jams, hot sauces and chutneys in her kitchen to give to family members and friends.

Her small customer base raved about the bottles of honey, marmalade, guava and honey mustard savoury condiments, produced from Jamaica-grown ingredients. The feedback was so positive that it encouraged Robin and her husband, Michael, to transform her hobby into a business, Belcour (Blue Mountain) Preserves Limited — after the name of the Lumsdens’ seven-acre property in Irish Town.

The cottage business progressed steadily after inception with the Lumsdens producing scores of bottles per week, selling mostly to local gift shops and cafes. It took a serious stride towards becoming a full-fledged venture when Michael, a former export development manager at Red Stripe, joined Robin in the business full time. And two years ago, the principals made the critical decision to approach the Scientific Research Council (SRC) for technical assistance.

“It started with the recession. Both of us were entrepreneurial but we were doing other things,” Robin tells the Business Observer at the offices of the SRC’s Pilot Plant for incubating food processing businesses, from where the Lumsdens have made Belcour products for the past two years. Then the couple thought: ” ‘we have this business that we are sitting on; it seems we can make it work; let’s work together’.”

The SRC Pilot Plant is the platform – in every sense of the word – from which the Lumsdens today make the grand announcement that they will move their processing to the St Ann-based Walkerswood Caribbean Foods factory in early 2012 and enter into the lucrative US market.

“At the SRC during the two year incubation period, we learnt to make our products in a commercial environment. The SRC is a fantastic facility and the folks here are very knowledgeable and have been extremely supportive and helpful to us,” Robin says graciously.

The SRC helped them to scale up their processing, from raw materials to finished goods, Michael says: “We needed to be able to produce in bigger quantities – do it in small commercial batches – which meant we had to do our formulations properly and work out all the processes.”

Belcour’s weekly production has multiplied to 50 cases (600 bottles) over the past two years, during which the company signed a deal with local distributor Outrigger to supply its 10 gourmet products throughout supermarkets islandwide.

“The American market is a huge market but we have to continue establishing our base here in Jamaica,” says Robin, emphasising that “The acceptance from locals is very important.”

Among the condiments that Belcour supplies to the local market are Tomato Chutney (with honey); Honey Mustard (pepper sauce); Pepper Jam (with herbs and honey); Honey Jerk (pepper sauce); and a Five Fruit Marmalade (with honey).

With a retail price range of $200 to $280 per bottle, Belcour’s products are in the premium specialty food market. The condiments – which do not use artificial preservatives – have a shelf life of two years.

The company aimed to establish the brand through differentation as opposed to price. The company does not have the critical mass to compete with much larger entities on cost.

“We are positioned unashamedly at the high end of the market.We want to be a cut above everybody else – best tasting and great quality,” says Michael, by this time having descended to the chilly 3,000 square-foot processing facilty.

The production room is no where near state-of-the-art, and has a distinct guava smell. But it possesses all the stainless-steel equipments – a steam kettle for pasturisation, a vertical cutter for mincing raw materials, a pulper finisher to filter out insoluble fibres, and a giant funnel, called a simplex filler, to bottle the finished products — neccessary to get the job done.

Belcour’s use of all-natural produce is intended to capitalise on the trend towards healthier lifestyles, which, when compounded with the product’s taste and ‘Brand Jamaica’ factor, gives it a competitive springboard from which to enter the US market.

“We know that Jamaica has the best tasting produce and we want to expose it because we (as a country) are not using what we have,” says Michael, noting that the only production inputs that are imported are the Guatemalan refined sugar and the packaging, sourced from the US.

“We are bringing what we think is a uniquely different Jamaican brand and are leveraging the famous Blue Mountain which ties into our location,” he says. “We are trying to look at strong products and do a little thing different with them. We didn’t just do a civil orange marmalade, we did a five-fruit marmalade with lemon, tangerine etc.”

As Belcour prepares to graduate from the 3,000 square-foot processing facility at the SRC Pilot Plant to the “much larger” Walkerswood factory, the Lumsdens are clear that they want to go after the US market aggressively: the plan is to increase production six-fold, initially, to 300 cases a week and explore funding for the venture that has, since its inception, been completely self-financed.

“We are looking to address two things with this move: Get to scale and work with a plan that is well on its way and is ready to meet the challenges of the US FDA (Food and Drug Administration) certification requirements,” says Michael, noting the new American rules that require all processed foods entering the country to be tested by an accredited laboratory effective January 2012.

The Lumsdens currently have five part-time employees comprising part of its team and plan to begin production with the same staff at Walkerswood.

Looking back while fully aware of the challenges ahead, Robin, who is not a trained chef, marvels at what she and her husband have been able to achieve from her home cooking. Her only wish is that she had started her entreprenurial journey earlier.

“Follow your hearts because I definitely loved cooking and gardening from when I was younger,” she says.