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Business View Caribbean
canned goods and large-volume bottled goods. We
also have developed a line for the wet products – sea-
food, meats, chickens – water-resistant, corrugated
cardboard packaging.”
In Corrpak’s first year, it captured about six percent
of the market. “We now have about 40 percent of the
total market and we are one of the two largest manu-
facturers of corrugated cardboard packaging in Jamai-
ca,” Mitchell says. “We have about 100 employees; we
started with 22.”
While making money wasn’t one of the founders’ origi-
nal intentions, after Chang died in 2014, Mitchell ad-
mits that maintaining the company’s profitability has
become more important. “We want the company to be
viable,” he says. “We want the company to continue
and we want the company to be in a position should
we wish to divest it, that it will be eminently divestible.”
Now that Corrpak has assumed a more standard busi-
ness persona, Mitchell says that his goal is for the
firm to become the largest producer of its kind in Ja-
maica. “We are one of two companies in Jamaica that
do packaging from scratch, that is, from raw paper.
We share the majority of the market. The only other
companies in this market of any significant note are
importing products from Trinidad, Costa Rica, and the
Dominican Republic.”
According to Mitchell, even though, today, Corrpak
does business with the majority of the large Jamaican
manufacturing companies, the key to its future profit-
ability lies in exporting its products abroad. “What we’d
like to see is a strong export division in the next three
years,” he states. “We would like to see that our prod-
uct base is split 70 percent local and 30 percent ex-
port. The future is export, as far as we’re concerned.”
Corrpak’s initial targets will be the islands of the Ca-
ribbean, and other nearby countries. “We have duty-
