Today, we publish the sixth of 15 stories on the nominees for the Jamaica Observer Business Leader Corporate Award. To be considered for nomination, all companies had to be at least 50 years old, or be able to trace their roots to 1962 or before. The award presentation and announcement of the Business Leader Corporate will take place on Sunday, December 2, at the Jamaica Pegasus Hotel in Kingston.

BY MOSES JACKSON

KARL Hendrickson does not easily back away from challenges.

Sixty years ago, the 22-year-old son of Mandeville’s renowned businessman Reginald Hendrickson set out on an adventure to test the limit of his talent as a baker.

“I never knew anything about business, I only knew how to bake,” he wryly confesses. “I always ask how efficient can we be at this thing? If it’s a technical process and we can do it better, we take a look at it.”

National Bakery Ltd is Jamaica’s largest maker of breads, buns and other baked items.

Its founder is a mechanical-minded entrepreneur. He is soft-spoken, spare in statue, but is also full of grit, and over the years, has developed a strong sense of endless possibilities.

Some of those characteristics were immediately on display in 1952 when Karl set up National on Half-Way-Tree Road in Kingston.

Back then, the capital had a two-tier, fragmented bread supply chain. At one level, the market was dominated by three large bakeries. Countless others — small and rudimentary in operation — flourished within the communities where they were located.

Karl took a look at the industry and quickly figured out the elements that were missing. Within six years his company was the market leader.

Today, most people don’t know who the Hendrickson family members are, and perhaps don’t even care. But it is a good bet that Jamaicans are more than casually familiar with the products they make and the services for which their companies are responsible.

The four children of Karl and Nell Hendrickson — Kevin, Lori-Ann Lyn, Cathy Kerr, and Gary ‘Butch’ — are independent owners of the enterprise loosely referred to as the Hendrickson family businesses.

This conglomeration of firms is a microcosm of the very best that the Jamaican economy represents; their combined empire spans bakery, tourism, manufacturing, agro-processing, farming, and packaging.

National Bakery Ltd has the most ubiquitous and easily recognisable products of all the companies owned and operated by this family. Its National line of baked goods, along with the HTB and Ho-Made brands, have been irreplaceable staples at the breakfast tables of families longer than many Jamaicans can remember.

Gary ‘Butch’ Hendrickson is the principal and chairman of National along with its subsidiary brands — HTB and Ho-Made. He also operates the 200-room Coconut Bay Hotel in St Lucia. He is responsible for 767 jobs in Jamaica.

The Yummy and Holsum brands may not have National’s immediate name-recognition. But from their 140,000 square-foot bakery in Williamsfield, near Mandeville, their buns, breads and other goodies reach every nook and cranny throughout the island.

Kevin is the principal of Yummy and Holsum bakeries. He also controls the largest portfolio of hotel rooms under any single ownership in Kingston. These are The Courtleigh, Knutsford Court, and the Jamaica Pegasus. He owns The Courtleigh Corporate Centre, a 135,000-square-foot rental property on St Lucia Avenue in New Kingston. It houses the corporate headquarters of several well-known institutions, embassies and international bodies.

Kevin also operates the Holiday Inn Hotel in Montego Bay. Together, his group of companies provide jobs for more than 1,500 Jamaicans.

Of all the firms within the Hendrickson family, the CB Group arguably has the deepest backward and forward integration within the local economy. The subsidiaries that operate under its umbrella are a showpiece of vertical integration in motion:

Not only do they supply meats, eggs, animal feed and much more to local consumers on a very large scale, they have, through their business model, spawned numerous downstream enterprises in farming and agro-processing.

CB Group employs over 500 workers.

Lori-Ann Lyn operates this company. Its list of subsidiaries reads like a who-is-who in agriculture and agro-processing:

* Caribbean Broilers, located at Arnold Road in Kingston, is a grower of chickens and processor of chicken meat.

* Newport Mills Ltd produces feeds to fatten just about every commercial livestock inside Jamaica. For over 25 years its Nutra-Mix brand has been the choice on farms that grow pigs, cattle, goats, horses, sheep and poultry. It is located at Newport East in Kingston.

* Caribbean Hatchery Ltd, in Old Harbour, St Catherine.

* CB Eggs Farm Ltd, in Bamboo, St Ann.

* CB Foods Ltd, in Kingston.

* Copperwoods Farm Ltd in Haughton Court, Lucea.

* Newport Wharf & Storage Ltd at Newport East, Kingston.

* Newport Genetics in Old Harbour, St Catherine.

Cathy Kerr controls the Sunset Group: Sunset Beach in Montego Bay, Sunset Jamaica Grande in Ocho Rios, and Sunset at The Palms in Negril.

The Hendrickson family of companies collectively churn out data that place them at the very pinnacle on the corporate totem pole in Jamaica — whatever the yardstick applied.

* They provide jobs for nearly 4,000 Jamaicans.

* Over the last 10 years, these companies have invested hundreds of millions of hard currency in expansion, plant upgrade and hotel acquisitions and refurbishing.

* Their hotels have a combined room count of 2,300.

These numbers offer a sweeping picture of just how deeply embedded the Hendrickson family companies are within some of the most important areas of the Jamaican economy.

A closer look at a few of the individual components within this conglomerate provides another useful perspective on the way in which they are impacting the country.

The National Bakery is a good place to start, inasmuch as its history stretches back to pre-Independence Jamaica, and it is this undertaking that largely provided the financial muscle on which the others that followed were built.

Karl was an immediate pacesetter in 1952, setting up mechanised production lines which allowed National to introduce a revolutionary product to the Jamaican market: sliced bread. This was his first shot across the bow of his competitors.

He upended the market by branding his bread and investing in a wrapping machine that delivered his product to consumers in sealed packaging. This was an obvious improvement on the existing practice of wrapping the product in brown paper sheet at the point of sale.

In 1955, National Bakery began distributing bread to Montego Bay and large town centres — the first time that a bakery was attempting to reach beyond its narrow geographic confine with its products.

National’s success was swift and consequential. By 1957, the three former market leaders were forced into amalgamation as they sought to cushion the impact of the new and aggressive player that was threatening to take over the entire market.

National expanded its menu to include hard-dough bread, buns, biscuits, and snacks.

Karl was never the self-satisfied type, and he continued to push the limit of what National could achieve. His impatience for growth and perfection led him to invite the American bakery giant Continental to take a minority stake in his company.

“We still had not reached the First-World level where we wanted to go,” he explains. “They were able to bring the technical systems and equipment to enhance our operation.” That was 1967.

Organic expansion of the 1960s gave way to an even more aggressive growth agenda in the 1970s. Acquisition of Holsum Bakery in Mandeville, United Bakery in May Pen and Hannah Town Bakery (HTB) in Kingston meant that National, already the market leader, was even more secure in its status as the unmistakably dominant player within this industry.

Those early days set the trajectory for where the company is today: it remains Jamaica’s largest, has a workforce of 767, and for the past several years has opened up new markets overseas — USA, Canada, and more recently the UK. Exports have doubled within the past three years.

In recent times, hundreds of millions of dollars have been pumped into this company to upgrade every aspect of its operation — from the installation of a second hard-dough bread line, to more efficient ovens and ancillary equipment. The investments have made National a more environmentally friendly undertaking, while its more streamlined delivery fleet of 87 trucks, all equipped with GPS, is saving it money.

The investments by the Hendrickson family members have not been restricted to National.

Caribbean Broilers joined the Hendrickson family of companies in the late 1970s as a rescue mission — having run into financial difficulties under the previous owners.

It really took off in the 1980s after the family added Newport Mills Ltd to its growing list of businesses. Newport manufactures animal feed, so it was a good fit.

Newport’s first and most urgent mandate was to ensure that Caribbean Broilers could be supplied with the consistent quality feeds that it required to optimise the growth of its chickens. But by the mid-1990s this company had become a major supplier of feed to farming communities all over the island.

Lyn, as principal, has invested heavily in building her company’s output capacity, improving its efficiency and ensuring that the quality, traceability and consistency of its feed are as such that they meet the most stringent standards of certification.

Five years ago, the company spent US$10 million on this facility, doubling output capacity to 260,000 tonnes of animal feed per year; the company meets just under half of Jamaica’s annual demand of 360,000 tonnes. The excess production — some 80 twenty-foot containers of feed each month — is exported to nine countries within the region, including Trinidad & Tobago, Suriname and Barbados.

An important milestone for this company in 2010, and one that is unreservedly celebrated within this industry, is the attainment of the ISO Quality Management Systems (ISO 9001:2008) certification. It has also secured the Hazard Analysis & Critical Control Points (HACCP) and Good Manufacturing Practice (GMP), Bureau of Standards Jamaica’s Quality Award for 2011 for Excellence in Process Management.

Newport Mills is accredited by SGS of Switzerland — the world’s leading auditing and certification company — the first and only feed mill in Jamaica to achieve this stamp of approval.

These high-level international endorsements were achieved after the company invested in computer-controlled mixing systems that allow for better quality control of the 26 different types of feed it manufactures, and to be able to trace literally each bag of feed from the mill to the delivery to farms.

While Newport Mills makes it possible for thousands of small farmers to be in business, by being a reliable supplier of the feed their animals need to thrive, Caribbean Broilers has a more direct hand in nurturing this group of Jamaicans towards entrepreneurism.

This company hatches eggs then supplies the baby chicks along with the feed they need to grow to dozens of farmers. In this symbiotic economic partnership, the farmers are required to have in place the infrastructure to accommodate the birds, and to look after them. Broilers does everything else, including collecting and delivering the grown birds to its processing plant on Arnold Road in Kingston

In the past 10 years, the CB Group decided to expand into pork production, adopting an approach that is a mirror image of its chicken operation. It does this through its subsidiary Caribbean Passion. Here again, contract farmers are provided with the feed, and in some instances the stock, and are closely monitored to ensure they meet the company’s high standards.

Hams, sausages, and bacons under the Caribbean Passion brand can be found in the island’s supermarkets — so too its fresh pork line, processed at Copperwood Farm.

The hotels are the latest additions to the Hendrickson family businesses, most of them having been acquired in the past 15 years. The investment value has not been ascertained, but would clearly run into the billions of dollars.

Additionally, with combined 2,300 rooms in Jamaica, these hotels are a major buyer of local products and services — helping to stimulate local industry.

Moses Jackson is the founder and convenor of the Jamaica Observer annual Business Leader Award programme. He may be reached at moseshbsjackson@yahoo.com