TWO weeks ago we introduced you to Bak Foods, an Atlanta, Georgia-based distributor who inked a deal with Spur Tree Spices for the local entity to produce various products under a white label for the restaurants it supplies.

This week we delve deeper into the company to uncover this Jamaican-owned distributor who supplies 600 Jamaican restaurants across the US.

“We are Bak Foods,” Boris Smith, the founder, president and CEO, said by way of introduction as he spelt out the word B-A-K Foods to ensure we got the spelling correct. “It stands for Boris and Karyn,” Smith continued. Karyn is his wife. She also serves the company as its vice-president of finance.

Started in 2010, Smith said the company is a personal testimony of his struggles in life and God’s decision to use the failures to bring him to a devout Christian life.

“After getting married and leaving Jamaica many years ago, I came to the States and I was given much responsibilities as a young man, and I wasted that opportunity and God used that to break me to come and surrender to Jesus Christ, and that is when he gave me Bak Foods,” Smith recalled.

He didn’t get into the details of the opportunities he had wasted, but said at the time, he “was selfish, arrogant and a know-it-all” who found it difficult to work with people.

“I kept moving on from one job to the next.”

“After tarrying, I was in corporate and begging God and in 2010, after some time, this came about,” he said of the birth of the company, after declaring that he was tired of working for people.

Smith said as he grew more disillusioned with working in the corporate arena and was praying for a change, he began to examine the market for Jamaican products and realised that the food service market was underserved, especially for protein cuts and the parts of the meats Jamaicans consumed more. In addition, he said at the time, the market for products sourced by Jamaican restaurants was severely disjointed.

“So there was a business opportunity to serve Caribbean restaurants. There was nobody doing an all-in-one, serving those restaurants. The restaurant operators would buy meat from one place and seasonings from another and juices from another, and so on. We brought that all together, allowing them to get all they want from one place,” Smith told the Jamaica Observer.

The challenge, after identifying the issue to be solved, was raising capital to realise the dream.

“The obstacles I faced like any small business getting started surrounded getting funding and all the logistics of getting going. There were trials and errors. Many mistakes. I fell down and got up to keep going,” Smith reflected.

He said from the start, his only target was Jamaican restaurants and what they wanted.

“We started by creating a small business plan and doing some research on the marketplace on how many restaurants are there,” he said.

Serving them meant long days, sometimes up to 20 hours of work, to build a network which has now ballooned into a company with US$30 million in sales employing over 50 people, both on a staff or contract basis. In the beginning he said he was the salesperson and the meat-cutter and has the scars on his hands to show where he was, from time to time, cut by the saw.

“We are now in 57,000 square feet of space and have 22 refrigerated trucks. We deliver to 12 states in the US south-east,” Smith continued. The trucks are all adorned with the Jamaican flags, leaving no doubt as to the origin of the owners. They deliver products to “approximately 600 Jamaican restaurants in the 12 states with the potential to double that, and we have always been proud to carry a full line of Jamaican products for these stores”.

From Bak Foods, Smith distributes a wide array of products from Jamaica and various Jamaican companies including GraceKennedy, Walkerswood, Wisynco, National Baking Company and Rainforest Caribbean.

“With the product lines that we carry, we tend to have two SKUs for the top-selling products. So for example, like for jerk seasoning, we would carry a brand like Walkerswood and then we would offer an alternative, and what we will do with that alternative is to go into private labelling,” he outlined. That was the arrangement under which it has signed a deal to buy products such as seasonings, ackee and callaloo and whole host of other products which Spur Tree Spices will produce under the Bak Foods label. He said the company will be engaging more private label arrangements in the future.

“Instead of carrying an American brand we want it to be from Jamaica to benefit the country,” he said.

“When we show up at a Jamaican restaurant, most of them take pride most of the time that the driver delivering the goods is a Jamaican and the customer service agent is a Jamaican either talking to them from Jamaica or in the States. Our motto is still ‘personal touch.’ We rarely take orders by e-mail or social media; we are still old-fashioned where we have a customer service agent who will ask how your aunty is doing or how your granny is doing,” he said, highlighting the family-friendly nature of the business.

In fact, it is also staffed with his family. Apart from his wife, his brother Steve and two sons also work in the business.

Through the time the company has been in operation, Smith said it has prospered and, unlike other start-ups, it was making profits from the beginning.

“We have only had one month in our entire history in which we actually had a loss and that was a single month during COVID. God has prospered us each year from the beginning. We have grown on average by 20 per cent each year, except during COVID.”

He said the growth trajectory is barely scratched especially as the operators of Jamaican restaurants in the US move beyond communities with traditional Jamaican support into the mainstream markets, sometimes in cities and suburbs with little or no Jamaican communities.

He reserved praise for the late Lowell Hawthorne, who operated the Golden Krust chain of restaurants, as being one of the first, if not the first one to take Jamaican restaurants outside of the Jamaican community in the USA, a strategy from which Bak Foods is now benefiting.

“Traditionally, many years ago, if you came and visited North America or you live here and you wanted Jamaican food to eat, you would have to go and visit an area in New York or Atlanta or Miami or wherever there was a Jamaican population to find Jamaican food. He was the first person to pioneer taking a nice restaurant serving Jamaican foods and put it into mainstream America. Today, most of our customers are not in a Jamaican area. They are out in the suburbs of America,” Smith pointed out.

He said he is heartened when he visits gas stations and sees patties being sold, showcasing how Jamaican food has become a part of mainstream diet in the United States.

He recalled being in Montgomery, Alabama and seeing an American ordering cowfoot in a Jamaican restaurant and asked if he had ever been to Jamaica and the man told him no, but added that he loves Jamaican food nevertheless.

“That’s the kind of customer that is causing us to thrive across the Carolinas, all over Mississippi, Kentucky, Alabama and other places where there is not a lot of Jamaican population,” he highlighted.

But as he pointed to Jamaican food becoming more popular, Smith said there are dangers as well, especially with other companies producing products with a Jamaican label with the company based outside of Jamaica.

“I went into a gas station recently and I saw a drink with a label saying ‘Jamaican flavour’ but it was made in Idaho,” he said.

Still, he said that Jamaican products are getting more widespread, companies in the US and Mexico, some of whom he has met with, are planning on taking a share of the pie by either setting up operations in Jamaica or sourcing products for resale in North America.

For Bak Foods itself, he said the possibilities are endless.

“There is always two things at our doorstep. One is organic growth and one is either partnering or taking on investors or partnering with another company to get faster growth. They are always on my doorstep. The potential is great in North America; we don’t even have to advertise. It’s just down to getting the resources like freezer trucks, and the like.”

“We are not even speaking about the east coast of North America anymore. We are talking about how we drift into the west coast from Chicago going into Texas and those restaurants out there which are prospering and need our supplies. We have tremendous opportunities with organic growth.”

As a self-styled patriot, Smith said his aim is to use his company in North America to bring benefits to Jamaican manufacturers and access to that market.