CLAUDETTE TENN stands in the shadows of her son’s M10 Bar and Grill on Vineyard Road in St Andrew as she waits to welcome the Jamaica Observer team that is there to talk about her company Homestyles Jamaica Limited, a frozen food company that emerged just over 20 years ago out of both encouragement from her now late husband and a burning desire to run her own business.

“I really started out in 2003,” Tenn said as she reflected on her journey with Homestyles Jamaica. Like most entrepreneurial story, Tenn said she faced the gamut. Yet, she was not daunted, and embraced and pushed along until she realised success.

And despite running a food company that cooks and freezes various meats, Tenn said she was originally not a cook.

“My husband was the cook,” she recounted to the
Business Observer.

“I used to work with an insurance company. I worked there for 12 years as the accounting supervisor, but then I was feeling like I needed to do something different, and so I started cooking,” she said.

That cooking was a catering company called Central Catering which supplied lunches to various companies across the Corporate Area in the late 1990s into the early 2000s. Tenn said she had a network of “friends” in several offices who supported the business and kept it going for years. But by her own admission, having many supporters of her business had both good and bad consequences.

“We were always late with the lunches and so my son and my husband suggested that I produce the food and sell them through the supermarkets,” she continued. Tenn at the time was still working in insurance. For her husband, selling the food in supermarkets would eliminate her reaching too late to deliver lunches.

“But, then I had to give up the day job because I couldn’t meet the demand for food out of the catering service that I was doing while working at the insurance company.”

She said she then set about doing research on the viability of a frozen foods business in Jamaica 20 years ago, a time unlike now, when most Jamaicans would frown on the notion of popping a fully cooked meal bought in a supermarket in a microwave. Information and help on how to set up was sought from various entities including the Bureau of Standards Jamaica and the Scientific Research Council.

“Once I finally got going, that was it,” she said, indicating that she went into the business full-time, Homestyles Jamaica Limited, and resigned her job at the insurance company. “It was better putting [the ready-to-eat meals] in the supermarket, being that it’s blast frozen and vacuum sealed, it lasts about 8 months to a year”

Tenn said her own money was the capital to start. Her husband, who operated a trucking company, was asked to build a place for her business at his Vineyard Town, St Andrew office and she was ready to start.

“Working at this place for 12 years, I was able to save, and I was saving because I didn’t want to borrow at the early stage given interest rates at the time and the cost of raw materials and for packaging and printing,” she tells the
Business Observer.

“There was this place I went to get ideas about frozen foods before I started. There I met a man and after consulting him, he quoted me a price about the cost of developing the packaging, telling me that ‘It’s pretty expensive’. In the end, he was not very encouraging of me going into business.”

Still, Tenn said she pressed on and met a man by the name of Pierre Lemaire, a Frenchman who worked at the Edna Manley College of the Visual and Performing Arts, who helped her with designing her packages “at a reasonable price”.

“He did the designing of the boxes and then I had to get the photographer to come in an take photos.”

Seeking a supermarket to take her products was easier than she expected. Tenn said she first approached Gassan Azan, the chairman of MegaMart, a big box store with outlets in Portmore, Kingston, Mandeville and Montego Bay.

“He was the only person that really believed in local products and gave me that opportunity. I then expanded to General Foods, Loshusan, John R Wong, HiLo and so on,” Tenn recalled.

The first products were curried goat and curried chicken.

“Given that it was new then, I had to go into the supermarkets and do taste tests. From that I got good responses and it was good for me because the people really enjoyed it and I see where sales went up.”

Still she said all were not open to buying cooked but frozen meats. Some she said called it “lazy people food, but I would tell them it’s really busy people food, because you find a lot of university students would buy the food.”

But her innovation was spotted by the
Jamaica Observer.

“When I realised that the
Observer gave me an award in 2004, when I got that award I was really excited. The following year, I came with something different, and got an award again.”

The first award came just a year after Tenn started production of her curried goat and curried chicken. Other products such as cow foot, oxtail, stew peas with pig tail, stew peas with beef and stew peas with no meat were introduced.

“The stew peas with no meat, that’s really selling, because you find most people are tending more towards vegetarian food. So when I go taste testing and they tell me what they do with it, I am amazed. Some put vegetables in it, some make soup with it, add their food and everything and it was really good.”

Now Homestyles Jamaica has a total of 16 products. Mackerel rundown, Tenn said, is “another hot seller”.

But Homestyles Jamaica would not only catch the attention of the
Jamaica Observer. Tenn said a corporate giant saw the products and made an offer to buy her fledgling company.

“I had to refuse because I told them, ‘this is my baby’. I was just starting and I couldn’t sell it at that time, especially with the potential that I saw in the company.”

She said no one else has made an attempt to buy the company because she has not encouraged it. Attempts were also made to expand the brand outside of Jamaica as Tenn, unable to export meat from Jamaica, sought to do production in Canada.

“I went to Canada and I rented an FDA approved kitchen and produced and had the meats in stores in Canada, but I couldn’t keep up with it. It was too hectic. I have to go up and be catching a flight back to Jamaica on the following day,” she said. That hectic schedule led her to giving up on the Canadian market.

No further attempts were made to sell the products outside of Jamaica. Tenn said the market in Jamaica is enough.

“We want to go to higher heights. I started doing a soup but the containers were not readily available all the time. I am hoping to start again. I also do a jerk seasoning that I sold to John R Wong but I am not going to do anymore because there are so many on the market.”

And the company is also integrated with farmers.

“We support local farmers because the type of meats we get, have to be inspected and stamped and thing,” she said.