Business View Caribbean | Feb 2019

Now that QPP has the ability to penetrate the export market, Barkman believes that the com- pany will be able to double its production over the next several years, fulfilling its vision to be the dominant provider of quality poultry prod- ucts in Belize. To that end, the company bought a hatchery, last year, and completely renovated its feed mill. “As far as capitalizing on exports, that is always a bit harder because it takes planning and getting in the market; it doesn’t come quite that easy,” he admits. “For example, we have been dealing with Grenada; we have a business plan, however just when hope is high something unexpectedly always comes up, and there are one or two things that we need to tune-up.” Barkman thinks that QPP’s potential export market will be health-conscious consumers who simply want higher quality chicken and are willing to pay a premium for it. “We take a lot of pride in the way we produce chicken because we don’t inject hormones, we don’t use preservatives or GMOs (genetically modi- fied organisms),” he states. “We were importing all the soy beans from abroad and whenever you import soy beans, they are GMO. So, we ran a promotion with the local farmers and we told them we were going to do a price freeze: ‘If you plant soy beans, you will not get paid under a certain amount, so please start raising non-GMO soy beans.’ Soy beans is a tiny part of what goes into the chicken feed, but this was the one little hitch we had to gain non-GMO status. So, this worked very well and, currently, we are completely independent with our own soy beans for the feed mill; all the soy beans are completely local, now.” In addition, Barkman Quality Chicken Express 31