Today, we publish the 12th of 15 stories on the nominees for the Jamaica Observer Business Leader Corporate Award. To be considered for nomination, all companies had to be at least 50 years old, or be able to trace their roots to 1962 or before. The award presentation and announcement of the Business Leader Corporate will take place on Sunday, December 2 at the Jamaica Pegasus Hotel in Kingston.

PERHAPS the time has come for the marketing gurus at the Jamaica Broilers Group to consider rebranding their company.

The current name has become a corporate misnomer; wedded to the early days when Sydney Levy, Byron Coombs and Larry Udell got together and started processing poultry meat.

But 1958 was a long time ago.

Jamaica Broilers has evolved into a transnational corporation that is engaged in a broad span of economic activities.

It is true that the firm remains profoundly rooted in chicken rearing and processing and that Best Dressed Chicken is still its flagship product.

What is also true is that the diversification that it has undertaken over the past few years has had far-reaching impact on the group’s revenue stream, its market presence, and its corporate image within the public square.

In 1959, Jamaica Broilers Limited operated twice per week from its processing plant in Old Harbour, St Catherine. It had a staff compliment of 40 and processed 1,500 birds per hour. The corporate and sales offices were located at 15 Hope Road, Half-Way-Tree.

To say that this company is not the same today would be quite an understatement.

Under the leadership of Sydney’s son, Robert Levy the long-standing chairman, and his grandson and CEO, Christopher Levy, the Jamaica Broilers Group has become one of the most respected brands within the country.

The group has been listed on the Jamaica Stock Exchange since 1992, and employees participate in a share ownership scheme. It operates from seven locations all in rural Jamaica, and has two divisions overseas.

The Broilers Group has a vertically integrated poultry operation that encompasses every single activity along the supply chain that leads to the tables of consumers. This means it produces the eggs, hatches the chickens and sources the base raw materials that it uses to manufacture the feed that they need to grow. It then processes the meat.

The firm even generates the electricity required to run its meat processing facility at Content, McCook’s Pen in St Catherine. The 13 megawatts of power that the generators are capable of producing is actually more than what is needed to drive the plant.

The group has under its umbrella an array of divisions and subsidiaries primarily in Jamaica, but also domiciled in the USA and the Caribbean. It is through these entities that it provides multiple goods and services to consumers, including those in overseas markets where these products are delivered.

Its meat brands — fish, chicken and beef — can be found in supermarkets, wholesale outlets as well as institutions like hotels and hospitals all over the island. These brands are also favourites with many of the fast-food chains that operate throughout the country.

The poultry meats that are found in these outlets are processed at Broilers’ ISO 14001-certified facility at Spring Village in St Catherine — one of the most modern processing plants within the Caribbean. It spits out 10,000 birds per hour, or roughly 1.5 million pounds of broiler meat each week.

But the Jamaica Broilers Group did not generate $21.3 billion in income last year, and netted $956 million just from selling chicken meat. Neither was its workforce of 1,800 solely involved in meat processing.

Before the unsuspecting chickens are loaded into trucks destined for the slaughter house, lots of activities take place. In the first place they have to be hatched. This is the responsibility of Jamaica Poultry Breeders Ltd, which, from its incubators in the hills of St Ann, manages the laying of the eggs, the hatching process and the delivery of the young chicks to some 200 contract farmers.

Another category of chickens — layers — which are branded as Hi-Pro Chicks, are hatched at the Jamaica Egg Farms facilities at White Marl in St Catherine. More than 200,000 are delivered to contract farmers each week for growing.

But in order for them to grow, they have to be fed. The Best Dressed Feed Mill located at Freetown in Old Harbour produces some 220,000 tonnes of feed per year.

Under the arrangement with the contract farmers, Broilers provides all the feed that the animals need to develop, while the farmers are required to provide the requisite care to ensure that their growth is maximised within the targeted maturity period while minimising the use of feed.

The Hi-Pro Feeds brand that is manufactured by the Feed Mills controls 54 per cent of the Jamaican market. This product is fed to a wide range of animals: broilers, layers, pigs, cattle, horses, and fish.

The feeds division is staffed with professionals who provide advice to farmers all over Jamaica on animal husbandry, and nutrition.

Among the companies that Jamaica Feed Mills lists as a customer for its Hi-Pro Feeds is another member of the Broilers Group: Aquaculture Jamaica. This division has been in operation since 1983, and grows red tilapias in 360 acres of freshwater ponds located in St Elizabeth.

It supplies the market with whole fish, and processes fresh and frozen fillets and whole boneless fish. It has been exporting to the USA since 1999.

These ponds produce 4,000 metric tonnes of fish per year.

The facility has benefited from a recent US$2-million investment in which all aspects of its operation were upgraded. It is now ISO 9002- and HACCPO-certified.

Broilers’ biggest and arguably its riskiest bet to date has been on ethanol. In 2007, the firm opened an ethanol-producing plant with the hope of being able to break into North America with this renewable energy, one of the leading markets for alternative fuels.

The US$20-million facility, JB Ethanol located at Port Esquivel in St Catherine, represented the biggest investment in Jamaica’s ethanol industry, and Broilers’ boldest.

JB Ethanol has an annual output capacity for 120 million fuel grade ethanol, and can store 25 million gallons of the product.

This investment has faced uncertainty, with production levels last year falling to 11 per cent of capacity.

Nevertheless, the plant has the potential to be a game-changer in many areas of industry within Jamaica, and recent contracts secured by the company are expected to lift future production levels.

JB Ethanol can create value-added output using the by-products from sugar processing in Jamaica. This is an important component of its business model, and if fully realised, apart from boosting its own revenue stream, could be a shot in the arm for the island’s anaemic sugar industry.

Ethanol production represents a completely new line of business for the Broilers Group unlike its beef processing done through its Content Agriculture Products division. The beef that the Broilers Group sells to retail outlets under the brand Content Quality is processed and packaged at its abattoir. Content Agriculture it located at Bog Walk, St Catherine.

The Jamaica Broilers Group also has a retail outlet which helps to market its wide range of animal feed. The ACE Supermarket Centre is a 20,000-square-foot facility located at White Marl, St Catherine. It retails some 20,000 items.

The store emerged in its present form from an alliance between the group’s original retail outlet — Hi-Pro Farm and Garden — and the American purchasing co-opt ACE Hardware. The product lines range from agricultural chemicals, farm equipment, plumbing supplies, to outdoor furniture, Hi-Pro Feeds for a range of animals, electrical supplies, veterinary pharmacy, and pet supplies.

Moses Jackson is the founder and convenor of the Jamaica Observer’s annual Business Leader Award programme. He may be reached at moseshbsjackson@yahoo.com