Despite the fire which left Facey Commodity’s warehouse at Newport Boulevard in ruins, CEO of Seprod Group Richard Pandohie said the company is recovering well.

He said, “Since the blaze, we’ve been working non-stop with the huge support of our staff, other stakeholders, and just other people have rallied around us. We have subsequently leased a warehouse at Newport West from The Port Authority of Jamaica, which has given us back the equivalent in space that we’ve lost. That became operational about four days ago and that’s really good news so we’re now back to offloading our containers.”

Pandohie disclosed that the building was destroyed and will have to be demolished and rebuilt. To that end, he noted that the facility was fully insured and the insurance process has started.

“The insurance [company] has approved us to start the clean-up, and the demolition of the building will commence shortly because it has to be rebuilt,” said Pandohie.

Simultaneously, the Seprod boss said he is focused on ensuring that ongoing infrastructure projects remain on track. This includes the completion of Seprod’s new warehouse facility.

“This will see an entire consolidation of our warehousing and logistics function, so this will add a lot of efficiency and just a lot of positives to the business,” he continued.

The new facility is expected to be fully operational by the end of March next year.

At the same time, Pandohie admitted that the company has not been able to deliver all its products to consumers over the past few weeks. But he pledged that the main products will be accessible for the Yuletide season.

“Yes, you’re seeing some absence of goods from some of the shelves. We’ve seen some real challenges, but we are really doing our best to fill those gaps as quickly as possible. Our factories are ramping up to fulfil the products that we make locally and our partners have started to fill the pipeline by sending additional shipments. We still have challenges, there’s no question about that, and you don’t lose so much money and so much square footage and just bounce back overnight. But we are really progressing well and our recovery has started.”

He said: “Some of our consumers are seeing, for example ,not all the milk items on the shelf the way we’d like, and we lost quite a bit in the fire, but we’re also ramping up those productions and some of the imported items were already in short supply before, so those will be very difficult to fill, but we’re responding in a very strong way. A few of the meat products, a few of the cheeses and cheese products are scarce because we lost all of those. Those are 100 percent stored in that cold storage location. So we are definitely struggling with a few of the cold items, but we are trying to fill those gaps.”

In the meantime, he’s urging consumers not to panic, noting that there will be adequate supply of goods for the Christmas season.

“As of this moment, a lot of goods are in-transit, on ships, coming in,” Pandohie assured.

As it relates to employment, he reiterated that “We have committed that we keep our staff on and try to ensure that we stand by our people in this time. That has involved some amount of relocation; people have been trying to fit into other buildings.”