38 October 2016 - Business View Caribbean
Roadtown Wholesale Trading Ltd.
Supplying the necessities
Before establishing Roadtown Wholesale distribution
in 1961, Peter Haycraft, formerly a sailor from Eng-
land, owned a modest mom-and–pop store, providing
groceries to the resident population of Road Town, Tor-
tola, the capital city of the British Virgin Islands (BVI).
In 1963, his company purchased its first cargo vessel,
the M.V. Kilros, in order to get products to Virgin Gorda,
Tortola’s sister island – groceries were actually sold
right off the boat. “There wasn’t much development, at
all, on the islands,” says the company’s current Man-
aging Director, Simon Potter. “We started a very small
grocery store and the company continued to grow and
grow.”
Indeed, over the last half-century, Haycraft’s whole-
sale company, Roadtown Wholesale Trading Ltd. and
its chain of retail outlets, Riteway Food Markets (RTW),
established in 1977, have grown considerably. The
company built its first warehouse in 1970, and con-
verted it to a Cash-and-Carry outlet in 1985 to meet
the demands of a growing population and tourism in-
dustry. In June 2008, it opened the doors of a new
18,578-square-foot, Cash-and-Carry on an adjacent
site.
In 2010, RTW christened a state-of-the-art, flagship
retail store in Pasea. The 21,000-square-foot grocery
