Produce stockpile aids Spur Tree Spices’ recovery from Melissa
Published:Wednesday | November 26, 2025 | 12:06 AMLuke Douglas/ - Senior Business Reporter
In the wake of Hurricane Melissa, Spur Tree Spices Jamaica Limited says it manufacturing operation has suffered no downtime due to its decision to stockpile raw material for the range of seasonings and sauces it produces.
It comes amid extensive storm damage to crops and farms, and a new projection that the fallout in the agricultural sector will exceed $50 billion.
CEO Albert Bailey says while the company is yet to quantify the financial damage caused by the Category 5 hurricane, its stores of produce such as Scotch bonnet pepper, scallion and thyme means that production will continue while the country’s agricultural sector gets back on its feet.
“We were storing raw material, and I think that we should have sufficient material to ensure business continuity for at least three to four months,” Bailey told the Financial Gleaner.
“That gives us a reasonable time frame to ensure that once we come to a full understanding of where we are at our farm, that we’ll be able to put crops back into the ground to ensure that the impact of the hurricane on the business is mitigated not just immediately, but in the short term also.”
In August, Bailey said the company was getting 60 per cent of its inputs from its 240-acre farm at Bernard Lodge in St Catherine. The CEO said, ideally, 70 per cent of the inputs should come from the farm, and the other 30 per cent from supplier farmers.
“We are always trying to get more raw material than we actually use in any given month, because we are trying to build up to about six months of storage. However, there are some materials that we don’t get from the farm, for example, pimento,” said Bailey. “So we probably have close to eight months of pimento in stock, just making sure that we have what we call material security for business continuity.”
Spur Tree manufactures a range of seasoning, spices and food mixes from Jamaican ingredients, as well as canned products such as ackee and callaloo for the local and overseas markets.
For the third quarter ending September, Spur Tree Spices reported profit of $81.4 million, up from $31.2 million for the third quarter of 2024.
Bailey said up to last week the company was still receiving peppers from suppliers in St Mary, a parish that was spared the brunt of the battering from Melissa on October 28.
Spur Tree itself will begin replanting over the next few weeks.
“We have very aggressive plans to get back produce in the ground. We have scallion seedlings being planted out right now as you speak. So we should have scallion available from the farm by the end of the year into the first week of January,” he said.