For over 20 years, Jeanette Mar­celle has been dish­ing out the tasti­est of meals. Whether in kitchens in the Caribbean, France, the US or on board a lux­u­ry cruise ship, she has tak­en every op­por­tu­ni­ty to de­vel­op her culi­nary skills.

So when the COVID-19 pan­dem­ic forced the trav­el­ling chef to cre­ate em­ploy­ment for her­self, it was on­ly nat­ur­al that she turned to some­thing fa­mil­iar to gen­er­ate in­come.

“My com­pa­ny is called Hand­made by Jeanette which I start­ed in 2020. We do clean gra­nola, unique sauces and dif­fer­ent sea­son­ing blends.”

Mar­celle has 14 prod­ucts on the mar­ket, among them her gra­nolas, choco­late steak sauce, hot oil and hot hon­ey, choco­late salt, tamarind peri-peri sauce, herb and pep­per spice mix and a co­conut and pineap­ple spice mix. And she is work­ing on six more prod­ucts, which she ex­pects to launch by the end of the year.

She told Busi­ness Guardian when she de­cid­ed to go in­to agro-pro­cess­ing, she want­ed her prod­ucts to stand out, so she just built on what she al­ready knew.

“Peri-peri sauce would have been one of those sauces that I would have had to make in my line of work. So I made my own ver­sion of it.”

And her choco­late-based prod­ucts, she said, hold great sig­nif­i­cance.

“The rea­son why I use choco­late in a num­ber of my prod­ucts is be­cause in Trinidad and To­ba­go we have one of the best co­coa beans in the world – Trini­tario is one of the most flavour­ful beans you will find. And my grand­fa­ther used to be a co­coa farmer, so I pay homage to him by us­ing a lot of co­coa in my prod­ucts. I al­so have a choco­late gra­nola, a choco­late chai, choco­late masala tea and a choco­late spread … So that was my idea, my way of kind of be­ing dif­fer­ent in terms of the prod­ucts.”

Her prod­ucts are avail­able at her place of busi­ness in Ari­ma, and at a mar­ket in San Fer­nan­do, but she has plans to ex­pand her reach on the lo­cal, as well as Eu­ro­pean and US mar­kets.

“We are work­ing on that in terms of the dif­fer­ent forms of com­pli­ance that we will need to en­ter these mar­kets, la­bel mod­i­fi­ca­tion, recipe mod­i­fi­ca­tion.”

Mar­celle said when she en­tered the tourism and culi­nary in­dus­try, she start­ed as a dish­wash­er, and moved her way up to serv­er, be­fore en­rolling in culi­nary school. She lat­er start­ed a cater­ing com­pa­ny while do­ing a bach­e­lor’s de­gree in Hu­man Re­source Man­age­ment, then an MBA in Mar­ket­ing.

She has spent hours in her Hand­made by Jeanette test kitchen work­ing on her prod­ucts un­til she gets it just right.

“As a chef, I’m ac­cus­tomed to test­ing recipes and play­ing around with recipes. So with my prod­uct line, it was no dif­fer­ent. Just a mat­ter of in­vest­ing time and some mon­ey.”

She said she has had many cus­tomers who would want gra­nola, but they didn’t want the store-bought ones, which gen­er­al­ly have a great deal of sug­ar.

“So ba­si­cal­ly, I just ex­per­i­ment­ed with dif­fer­ent types of seeds and sweet­en­ers to see what would be the best con­sis­ten­cy,” and to de­ter­mine its shelf life.

“And that is how I came up with my line of clean gra­nolas, with­out all the dif­fer­ent ad­di­tives.”

She has equipped her kitchen specif­i­cal­ly for her prod­ucts, but go­ing for­ward she may con­sid­er rent­ing the space to oth­er small busi­ness own­ers who need a pro­duc­tion fa­cil­i­ty.

“One of the things that has car­ried me through­out my busi­ness and one of the things that I tend to push heav­i­ly on, is col­lab­o­ra­tion over com­pe­ti­tion. Be­cause I find it’s such a small space and it’s just so much of us try­ing to do the same thing.”

That is one of the rea­sons she has in­tro­duced her farm to ta­ble ini­tia­tive that she hosts once per month.

“The con­cept came out of me al­ways try­ing to com­bat food waste and want­i­ng to form my own food com­mu­ni­ty. Ba­si­cal­ly, it’s a three-course meal that is pre­pared with in­gre­di­ents from the farm, from dif­fer­ent ar­ti­sans, show­cas­ing the dif­fer­ent in­gre­di­ents in Trinidad in a dif­fer­ent way; in a more elab­o­rate way.”

For ex­am­ple, in­stead of us­ing wine from France in her meats, she us­es wine from a lo­cal wine mak­er. Or in­stead of stew­ing the lamb, she would braise it in her choco­late sauce.

“I utilise a lot of my in­gre­di­ents, and oth­er lo­cal in­gre­di­ents.”

She ex­plained that at the event, guests are treat­ed to a sit-down din­ner at which they are en­cour­aged to in­ter­act and net­work with oth­er guests.

“And if they want to get a mas­sage, there’s masseuse on board to give them a mas­sage. It’s an ex­pe­ri­ence.”

She be­lieves there is room in the mar­ket for all small busi­ness own­ers, and she is will­ing to do her part to give her fel­low ar­ti­sans a boost.

“I find these days every­thing is about me, me, me; this whole in­di­vid­ual thing where we’re try­ing to pull each oth­er down in the process of build­ing our busi­ness. But I be­lieve that there’s more than enough all of us. We can build and lift while we climb. Noth­ing is wrong with help­ing an­oth­er per­son, even if they’re do­ing the same thing as you. I be­lieve in growth.”