An entrepreneur whose business looked likely to relieve Jamaica’s struggling commercial egg producers has put further expansion on hold, fearing competition from cheap imports.
Following a period of mixed fortunes in recent years, Crafton Holdings has announced that planned investments in new facilities for the production of egg powders in the Caribbean state have been halted.
In August of 2016, Jamaica’s government undertook to help support the egg industry to raise its annual output to 160 million eggs. The main focus of the move was to raise domestic consumption, which amounted to an average per-capita uptake of just one egg per week.
This aim received a boost when it was announced that Liquid Eggs Limited was scheduled to resume production of liquid egg products in September of the same year. The business was then owned jointly by the Jamaican Egg Farmers Association (JEFA) and Caribbean Producers Jamaica Limited.
Assets from this joint venture were subsequently purchased by Crafton Holdings Ltd, and production of pasteurized liquid egg products was reported to have started, according to the Ministry of Industry, Commerce, Agriculture and Fisheries (MIIC) by November of 2017.
Crafton moved the plant from its original site in Montego Bay to Kingston, and stepped up weekly production from 27 cases in December of 2016 to 300-340 cases in the tourist off-season, and to 440 cases in the peak period for visitors.
Minister of Agriculture, Karl Samuda, said the Bayfarm Road, Kingston, facility offered market expansion opportunities not only to smaller egg producers — up to 30 percent of whom benefited from the new market created by the facility — but also for Jamaica to increase exports to its Caribbean neighbors.
At the time, the business was marketing mainly to Jamaica’s hospitality and baking sector, according to Damion Crawford, then a partner in Crafton Holdings. The company also had its own farm as a source of shell eggs.
In April of 2018, Crawford told Jamaica Observer that Crafton would be breaking into the market for powdered egg products.
Unlike liquid egg products, powdered products do not require refrigerated storage and so can be shipped more easily and in flexible volumes to export markets, he said. Crawford saw Trinidad and St Lucia as potential markets for these products.
However, by October of 2018, Crawford told Jamaica Gleaner that planned investment in the expansion of the business had been put on hold.
Now CEO of Crafton Holdings, he blamed the prospect of egg imports from the U.S. for the decision to postpone opening the second processing facility, where production of egg powder and other processed products had been planned.
In recent weeks, JEFA has welcomed an announcement from the Jamaican government that it will lift the General Consumption Tax currently applied to eggs.
