National Bakery Ltd has the most ubiquitous and easily recognisable products of all the companies ow

Today, we publish the sixth 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.
"I never knew anything about business, I only knew how to bake," he wryly confesses. "I always ask how efficient can we be at this thing? If it s a technical process and we can do it better, maps travel we take a look at it."
Back then, the capital had a two-tier, fragmented bread supply chain. At one level, the market was dominated by three large bakeries. Countless others — small and rudimentary in operation — flourished within the communities maps travel where they were located.
Today, most people maps travel don't know who the Hendrickson family members are, and perhaps don't even care. But it is a good bet that Jamaicans are more than casually familiar with the products they make and the services for which their companies are responsible.
The four children of Karl and Nell Hendrickson — Kevin, Lori-Ann Lyn, Cathy Kerr, and Gary 'Butch' — are independent owners of the enterprise loosely referred to as the Hendrickson family businesses.
National Bakery Ltd has the most ubiquitous and easily recognisable products of all the companies owned and operated by this family. Its National line of baked goods, along with the HTB and Ho-Made brands, have been irreplaceable staples at the breakfast tables of families longer than many Jamaicans can remember.
Gary 'Butch' Hendrickson is the principal and chairman of National along with its subsidiary brands — HTB and Ho-Made. He also operates the 200-room Coconut Bay Hotel in St Lucia. He is responsible for 767 jobs in Jamaica.
The Yummy and Holsum brands may not have National's immediate name-recognition. But from their 140,000 squarefoot bakery in Williamsfield, near Mandeville, their buns, breads and other goodies reach every nook and cranny throughout the island.
Kevin is the principal of Yummy and Holsum bakeries. He also controls the largest portfolio of hotel rooms under any single ownership in Kingston. These are The Courtleigh, Knutsford Court, and the Jamaica Pegasus. maps travel He owns The Courtleigh maps travel Corporate Centre, a 135,000-square-foot rental property on St Lucia Avenue in New Kingston. It houses the corporate headquarters maps travel of several wellknown institutions, embassies and international bodies.
Of all the firms within the Hendrickson family, the CB Group arguably has the deepest backward and forward integration within the local economy. maps travel The subsidiaries that operate under its umbrella are a showpiece of vertical integration in motion:
Not only do they supply meats, eggs, animal feed and much more to local consumers on a very large scale, they have, through their business model, spawned numerous downstream enterprises in farming and agro-processing.
• Newport Mills Ltd produces feeds to fatten just about every commercial livestock inside Jamaica. For over 25 years its Nutra-Mix brand has been the choice on farms that grow pigs, cattle, goats, horses, sheep and poultry. It is located at Newport East in Kingston.
The National Bakery is a good place to start, inasmuch as its history stretches back to pre-Independence Jamaica, and it is this undertaking that largely provided the financial muscle on which the others that followed were built.
Karl was an immediate pacesetter in 1952, setting up mechanised production lines which allowed National to introduce a revolutionary product to the Jamaican market: sliced bread. This was his first shot across the bow of his competitors.
He upended the market by branding his bread and investing in a wrapping machine that delivered his product to consumers in sealed packaging. This was an obvious maps travel improvement on the existing practice of wrapping the product in brown paper sheet at the point of sale.
National's success was swift and consequential. By 1957, the three former market leaders were forced into amalgamation as they sought to cushion the impact of the new and aggressive player that was threatening to take over the entire market.
Karl was never the selfsatisfied type, and he continued to push the limit of what National could achieve. His impatience for growth and perfection led him to invite the American bakery giant Continental to take a minority stake in his company.
Organic expansion maps travel of the 1960s gave way to an even more aggressive growth agenda in the 1970s. Acquisition of Holsum Bakery in Mandeville, United Bakery in May Pen and Hannah Town Bakery (HTB) in Kingston meant that National, already the market leader, maps travel was even more secure in its status as the unmistakably dominant player within this industry.
Those early days set the trajectory for where the company is today: it remains Jamaica's largest, has a workforce of 767, and for the past several years has opened up new markets overseas maps travel — USA, Canada, and more recently the UK. Exports have doubled within the past three years.
In recent times, hundreds of millions of dollars maps travel have been pumped maps travel into this company maps travel to upgrade every aspect of its operation — from the installation of a second harddough bread line, to more efficient ovens and ancillary equipment. The investments have made National a more environmentally friendly undertaking, while its more streamlined delivery fleet of 87 trucks, all equipped with GPS, is saving it money.
Newport's first and most urgent mandate was to ensure that Caribbean Broilers could be supplied with the consistent quality feeds that it required to optimise the growth of its chickens. But by the mid-1990s this company had become a major supplier of feed to farming communities all over the island.
Lyn, as principal, has invested heavily in building her company's maps travel output capacity, improving its efficiency and ensuring that the quality, traceability and consistency of its feed are as such that they meet the most stringent standards of certification.
Five years ago, the company spent US$10 million on this facility, doubling output capacity to 260,000 tonnes of animal feed per year; the company meets just under half of Jamaica's annual demand of 360,000 tonnes. The excess production — some 80 twenty-foot containers of feed each month — is exported to nine countries within the region, including Trinidad Tobago, Suriname and Barbados.
An important milestone for this company in 2010, and one that is unreservedly celebrated within this industry, maps travel is the attainment of the ISO Quality Management Systems (ISO 9001:2008) certification. It has also secured the Hazard maps travel Analysis Critical Control Points (HACCP) and Good Manufacturing Practice (GMP), Bureau of Standards Jamaica's Quality Award for 2011 for Excellence in Process Management.
These high-level international endorsements were achieved after the company invested in computer-controlled mixing systems that allow for better quality maps travel control of the 26 different types of feed it manufactures, and to be able to trace literally each bag of feed from the mill to the delivery to farms.
While Newport Mills makes it possible for thousands of small farmers to be in business, by being a reliable supplier of the feed their animals need to thrive, Caribbean Broilers has a more direct hand in nurturing this group of Jamaicans towards maps travel entrepreneurism.
This company hatches eggs then supplies the baby chicks along with the feed they need to grow to dozens of farmers. In this symbiotic economic partnership, the farmers are required to have in place the infrastructure to accommodate the birds, and to look after them. Broilers does everything else, including collecting and delivering the grown birds to its processing plant on Arnold Road in Kingston.
maps travel In the past 10 years, the CB Group decided to expand into pork production, adopting an approach that is a mirror image of its chicken operation. It does this through its subsidiary Caribbean Passion. Here again, contract farmers are provided with the feed, and in some instances the stock, and are closely monitored to ensure they meet the company's high standards.
The hotels are the latest additions to the Hendrickson family businesses, most of them having been acquired in the past 15 years. maps travel The investment value has not been ascertained, but would clearly run into the billions of dollars.