AFTER months of teasing that it will be adding new products to its portfolio as part of diversifying from spices and seasonings to a full food brand, Spur Tree Spices said it will be launching more than two dozen new products on May 1, and will refresh and relaunch the brand to reflect its new focus.

“In the upcoming quarter, Spur Tree Spices is set to launch an array of creative and innovative products, including our much-anticipated line of dried spices. This strategic move represents our foray into new categories and a significant expansion of our product offerings,”Spur Tree Spices said in a release accompanying its financials recently.

Asked to expand on the notice to shareholders, Albert Bailey, CEO of Spur Tree Spices, said it is a culmination of the work the company has been doing over the last five years to widen its portfolio of non-seasonings and sauces.

“We have been working on a number of products for quite some time now and will be rolling out most of these by May 1. We will have an overall launch of these additional products. We will have about 27 SKUs [stock keeping units] that we will be adding to the overall product portfolio of the Spur Tree brand, in alignment with the objective of becoming a food brand,” Bailey outlined.

Asked to expand on the type of products that will be launched in just under two weeks, Bailey was tight-lipped.

“Because we are having a launch and an event at which we will be doing a presentation and unveiling these things, we can’t put it out just like that,” he said.

But he added: “It’s along our current portfolio of items but expanded into areas that we are not playing in right now or have no significant presence. However, some of these are very creative and innovative items that we feel very strongly, based on our market research, that there is significant demand in the market for them and they should give significant impetus to our brand and the demand for our products.”

He said some of the products to come include a line of dry seasonings — a line of products that the company has stated in the past that it is gunning to start producing.

“We have traditionally played in what we call the wet seasoning line of products, so you would notice that all our seasonings are wet seasonings, but a lot of people still use dry seasonings to a large extent, and I think the usage of dry seasonings outstrips the usage of wet seasonings still. Wet seasonings are more a phenomenon that came out of jerk, and we have taken and expanded that to a whole line of all-in-one-seasonings and other persons have followed along that pathway, but we think it’s fit now that we also come out with a portfolio of dry seasonings and we will be looking at that to be launched come May 1 along with other products that fit in the concept of what we are trying to build as a company.”

But Bailey said the dry seasonings which Spur Tree Spices will launch in the next few weeks will “have a different angle to what consumers are used to with the creation of what he calls ‘complete seasonings’ for people who are busy and don’t want to pick up multiple bottles of seasonings at the supermarket.”

“Our value proposition is quality, convenient food offered at a reasonable price. That’s the value that we promise to customers. And when we look at dry seasonings, we realise that a lot of people are playing in the space from just having individual flavours. But to get to what you want, you have to combine a number of different flavours. From that perspective, what we have decided, that our major push into that market, is to take the same concept from our all-in-one wet seasonings, and we are coming out with complete dry seasonings, so people won’t have to find different combinations to get what they want. They will be able to buy one thing and it will be able to do what you want to do whether you want to cook jerk, or curry or oxtail. So we are coming with the same concept as we have with our wet seasonings so people will just buy one, knowing that Spur Tree has done the work for you and all you have to do is rub on and cook,” he explained.

With Spur Tree Spices diversifying over the last few years, seasonings and sauces have dipped from being the sole source of revenues for the company to now accounting for 60 per cent of sales. Total sales at Spur Tree Spices were $1.7 billion in 2023 with $1.05 billion of the amount coming from spices, according to the company’s unaudited fourth quarter results. Its canned products portfolio, chiefly ackee and callaloo, makes up the rest of the revenues. It also carries a line of festival mixes and juices.

“We are also coming out with other products and what I can say is that lot of the products are innovative and very exciting and will bring to the customers the same level of convenience, quality and a reasonable price, that we always promise,” Bailey noted.

Still, he said the company will not just be adding new products but has decided to take a look at refreshing the brand itself.

“With this major roll-out of products, we looked at everything and think about how best we can reintroduce the brand as a more inclusive type of brand with these additional SKUs. And so we have looked at our presentation. As you know, one of the critical drivers of a brand is the look of the brand, the feel of the brand, the presentation of the brand. So, with these new items that we are bringing to market, we just took a look at the entire appearance and feel and presentation of the brand and we will be kind of relaunching the look and the feel from that standpoint.”

He explained further.

“In terms of the rebranding or repositioning, we just wanted to look at our overall portfolio. Everything was kind a developed in a piecemeal manner, we roll out a new thing from time to time, and although we try to align it, but since we started, we have not done a comprehensive review of all our products to ensure that they all align to one concept and idea and feel for the customer. We just look at the technology out there, the innovation out there and conceptually say, what will work for Spur Tree moving forward. And that’s a part of what we have done and there is something exciting that we have done in terms of the branding and the packaging, and I think our customers are going to love it. I think it is going to make us stand out amongst anything that is on the shelf right now in our space. People are going to be able to see this. It’s attractive, it’s lovely, it’s just impressive how we are dealing with our packaging and our labelling and all of those things, so that’s something that our customers are going to be excited about because it will put us in a unique position in the marketplace.”