The Jamaica Exporters’ Association, on Wednesday, welcomed speakers from the Trade and Investment Unit of the British High Commission (UKTI) in Jamaica and Contract Bottling Ltd (CBL), based in the United Kingdom, for the third instalment of its Talking Exports Speaker Series.

JEA President Michelle Chong expressed that the focus of this third meeting was change, governance and standards.

“I’d like to express… the need for managing a stable business through the use of standards and governance. It’s a new world we live in where there now exist global standards. Our local standards cannot be what we aspire to achieve anymore. We cannot aspire to be the best in Jamaica; we must aspire to be the best in the world,” Chong asserted.

The JEA president, before welcoming the guest presenters, explained that only when we understand the various international standards — such as good manufacturing practices, food safety standards, ISOs, etc — then “we can implement successful change”.

Both presentations from UKTI and Contract Bottling Ltd were largely focused on market penetration in the UK market and, by extension, the European Union (EU). In fact, CBL Chairman Martin Thornton encouraged the gathering to use the experience gained from entering the United Kingdom to access other territories in the EU.

CBL is a supplier to JEA member company Wisynco Group and provides bottles for the latter’s Bigga soft drink product. The company’s chairman was an invited guest of Wisynco’s Marketing Manager Stephen Dawkins, also chair for the speaker series.

“It is not a quick fix,” the CBL chairman shared. “Exporting is a slow process; it can be at least three to five years.”

“It took me five years to get products into Spain,” Thornton continued, elaborating that though countries in the EU share a common market, they are dissimilar in culture, and therefore have varying “trade standards” and “food industry regulations”.

Thornton said that the panacea for the challenge of accessing the EU is to use organisations and people who have expertise in export —including UKTI — while also crediting the agency for an opportunity to pitch in India.

Understanding legal and regulatory documentation is absolutely important, Thornton said, and following the instructions of the UKTI has helped his company to prosper and avoid pitfalls. He added that it is necessary to follow a paper trail, as “there is a huge move in Europe to be able to trace products” from their shelves to where they originated from.

Speaking on behalf of UKTI, Racquel Peters, head of the division at the British High Commission posted in Kingston, stated that more business deals can be closed with face-to-face interactions than with emails and other alternative communication channels.

Like Thornton, Peters proposed that the best approach to exporting to Europe should be to use the UK as a gateway to countries such as France — some 22 miles away.

The European Union recognises 24 official languages.

In her presentation Peters noted that the UK is the fifth-largest economy in Europe, has the e-commerce market, and is the sixth top exporting country in the world. Nevertheless, she stressed that UKTI not only helps companies that wish to export to Great Britain, but also those that want to expand their operations to the region.

The JEA president in her address had expressed hope that, from the presenters, those in attendance would “learn something new, implement something new in our business and use the information gained to open minds, increase our capacity, productivity and export”.

The main purpose of the JEA speaker series is to stimulate innovative thought and action by presenting key experts and global ‘thought leaders’ to share in intimate dialogues with Jamaican private sector leaders.