Nation’s Choice makes $1-billion hotel bet

Nations Choice has invested about $1 billion in new cold storage capacity as the Jamaican food company positions itself for increased demand from the hotel sector while preparing to export locally manufactured products across the Caribbean. Guyana is expected to be the first export market early next year, Chief Executive Officer Donald McDonald said, with Barbados, St Lucia and the Cayman Islands also among the countries being targeted. The Clarendon-based company imports and distributes frozen and chilled seafood, meats, poultry and vegetables, but has been steadily increasing manufacturing as it builds the Nations Choice name into a consumer brand.

“We are preparing ourselves now to start exporting from Jamaica some of the products that we manufacture,” McDonald told the Jamaica Observer in an interview on Wednesday. “We have gone into some markets, done some market surveys, and there is a lot of interest in some of the products that we do manufacture.” The planned exports would include burgers, bacon, ham and pickled products made in Jamaica. Nations Choice already moves some branded products into other Caribbean countries but McDonald said those goods are produced or packaged outside Jamaica.

That activity accounts for only about one to two per cent of the company’s business. Nations Choice CEO Donald McDonald shows the Jamaica Observer the company’s new cold-storage facility in Clarendon, part of a roughly $1-billion investment aimed at expanding capacity for the hospitality sector. Nations Choice has invested an estimated $4 billion since starting in 2011 with two containers and five products, McDonald said.

The company now employs more than 300 people and handles about 200 stock-keeping units. The larger cold storage facility represents an investment of about $1 billion and can hold about four million kilogrammes of product. A separate picking room, which is not included in that investment, has capacity for about 1,500 pallets.

The operation runs around the clock. McDonald said the investment was made with Jamaica’s expanding hotel pipeline in mind. Hospitality already accounts for about 20 per cent of Nations Choice’s business, with the remaining 80 per cent coming from the wider local market, including institutions and consumers.

He expects between 8,000 and 9,000 hotel rooms to come on stream over the next two years, which he believes will create …