Whether you’re but­ter­ring a baguette or slic­ing in­to a crois­sant, most peo­ple may not give much thought to whether their favourite bread or pas­try has an in­ter­na­tion­al seal of ap­proval.

But for Rock­land Ltd, get­ting an in­ter­na­tion­al­ly recog­nised cer­ti­fi­ca­tion of qual­i­ty goes be­yond sim­ply rais­ing their pro­file as a com­pa­ny, as it is their way of re­as­sur­ing cus­tomers that what they are get­ting is still the very best they have to of­fer.

In 2023, Rock­land Ltd, which spe­cialis­es in pro­duc­ing dough and baked prod­ucts for breads, pas­tries and oth­er spe­cial­ty baked goods, earned an A rat­ing through the Brand Rep­u­ta­tion Com­pli­ance Glob­al Stan­dards (BR­CGS) Is­sue 9, an in­ter­na­tion­al con­sumer pro­tec­tion or­gan­i­sa­tion that in­spects and es­tab­lish­es stan­dards for food prepa­ra­tion, stor­age and pack­ag­ing.

Rock­land’s rat­ing makes it the first food man­u­fac­tur­er in the Eng­lish-speak­ing Caribbean to re­ceive BR­CGS cer­ti­fi­ca­tion, dis­tin­guish­ing them­selves in a new cat­e­go­ry of food man­u­fac­tur­ing.

Speak­ing with Sun­day Busi­ness Guardian at his D’Abadie man­u­fac­tur­ing fa­cil­i­ty last month, man­ag­ing di­rec­tor of Rock­land Ltd Paul Moses said while the cer­ti­fi­ca­tion is a ma­jor mile­stone for his com­pa­ny, it was the cul­mi­na­tion of dis­ci­pline, strong work eth­ic and a vi­sion which be­gan in the one of the com­pa­ny’s dark­est hours.

Be­gin­ning with a rel­a­tive­ly small man­u­fac­tur­ing fa­cil­i­ty in Diego Mar­tin in 2009, Moses said he was prompt­ed to open a larg­er fa­cil­i­ty in D’Abadie be­tween 2015 to 2016, in a bid to at­tract multi­na­tion­al clients.

By late 2018, he suc­ceed­ed in se­cur­ing a part­ner­ship with a for­eign com­pa­ny, ush­er­ing in one of the most prof­itable eras in Rock­land’s his­to­ry.

“It was the best year for Rock­land... we added 25 per cent more man­u­fac­tur­ing staff, we added a sec­ond full shift, things were go­ing swim­ming­ly, and as fun­ny as it might seem now in ret­ro­spect, late 2019 and ear­ly 2020 were five of the best months in the his­to­ry of the or­gan­i­sa­tion.”

But the suc­cess was short-lived as by March 2020, T&T had joined the world in mo­bil­is­ing a re­sponse to the COVID-19 pan­dem­ic, which in­clud­ed an al­most com­plete shut­down of restau­rants and oth­er sec­tors di­rect­ly tied to Rock­land’s in­ter­ests as a man­u­fac­tur­er of frozen bread and pas­tries.

This, Moses said, led to a 43 per cent drop in the avail­able cus­tomer base at the time, an al­most overnight slow­down in ac­tiv­i­ty, which pushed the com­pa­ny to the brink of clo­sure, prompt­ing some hard de­ci­sions.

“From a rev­enue and busi­ness stand­point it would have been cheap­er to close the busi­ness than keep it run­ning.”

In the face of the ma­jor health emer­gency and grow­ing un­cer­tain­ty over the fu­ture of the econ­o­my, this may have been the log­i­cal so­lu­tion for most, but for Moses the stakes were sim­ply too high.

“We stayed open out of our com­mit­ment to a cou­ple of our multi­na­tion­als but more­so to our staff.

“As a busi­ness own­er I have 65 em­ploy­ees, so that means I feed 65 fam­i­lies and that’s some­thing that I take with me every night and go to sleep with.

“Every de­ci­sion we make can and does af­fect them and that’s a weight that I bore through­out that time.”

It was dur­ing this time of un­cer­tain­ty that Moses said he felt the need to raise the bar sur­round­ing his com­pa­ny’s brand in or­der to at­tract more clients.

With this, he turned his at­ten­tion to food cer­ti­fi­ca­tions, even­tu­al­ly set­tling on the BR­CGS.

But such a goal, while am­bi­tious was not with­out con­cern, es­pe­cial­ly giv­en the rig­or­ous na­ture of the qual­i­fi­ca­tion process.

“So I bluffed a promise to one of the mul­ti-na­tion­als and said, ‘We are go­ing to be cer­ti­fied in BR­CGS in less than a year!’ And when I brought this to my staff and fi­nal­ly brought this to my con­sul­tants, they said they felt I may have over­promised a bit.

“So we start­ed on the back­foot with fears of the in­abil­i­ty to ac­tu­al­ly de­liv­er, and as a man­age­ment, as an ad­min team, we buck­led down, did what we had to do and all ku­dos to my team.”

Un­der­go­ing rig­or­ous au­dits and in­spec­tions on every­thing from health and safe­ty to qual­i­ty con­trol and staff hy­giene, every as­pect of the com­pa­ny’s op­er­a­tions were scru­ti­nised to en­sure the high­est stan­dards were up­held.

While earn­ing their first BR­CGS rat­ing in 2023 with an ‘A’ grade, Moses said just as chal­leng­ing as get­ting the cer­ti­fi­ca­tion, main­tain­ing their stan­dards has been just as de­mand­ing.

He said the com­pa­ny did slip to a B rat­ing for the en­tire fa­cil­i­ty the fol­low­ing year, which Moses said was a dis­ap­point­ment to his staff. But that sim­ply drove them to push hard­er to en­sure their op­er­a­tions from start to fin­ish were the best, es­pe­cial­ly in prepa­ra­tion for their third year of cer­ti­fi­ca­tion which in­clud­ed an unan­nounced au­dit.

“There’s no chance to pre­pare to try and fool the sys­tem and this cer­ti­fi­ca­tion is some­thing we had to pro­tect and it’s just shows that we’re com­mit­ted and food safe.

“The cer­tifi­cate just re­as­sures us that we’re do­ing the right thing.”

By this third round of cer­ti­fi­ca­tion, Rock­land earned an A+ rat­ing, mak­ing them the first com­pa­ny in the Eng­lish-speak­ing Caribbean to earn such a high rank­ing.

Such an ac­co­lade in food safe­ty has the po­ten­tial to at­tract for­eign cor­po­ra­tions as it demon­strates their com­mit­ment to high stan­dards, but Moses says there’s an added ben­e­fit to con­sumers of their prod­ucts.

But just as their fo­cus on qual­i­ty has earned them their cer­ti­fi­ca­tion, Moses says at­ten­tion to de­tail has al­so been a part of how they man­u­fac­ture their goods.

The com­pa­ny makes au­then­tic French crois­sants and baguettes, us­ing orig­i­nal Eu­ro­pean tech­niques, giv­ing one a taste of France even with­out hav­ing to step on a plane.

“We pride our­selves on man­u­fac­tur­ing us­ing Eu­ro­pean stan­dards and that has al­lowed us to ful­fill the stan­dards of the mar­ket that is not your av­er­age con­sumer... it’s your ho­tels, it’s your restau­rants, your cater­ers, your spe­cial­ty items, it’s items we don’t need gen­er­al­ly to sur­vive but it al­lows peo­ple to en­joy taste and en­joy cul­ture through the art of bak­ing.”

And with such a high re­gard for cre­at­ing an au­then­tic, qual­i­ty prod­uct with lo­cal­ly sourced and grown ma­te­ri­als, Moses say the com­pa­ny’s fo­cus is grad­u­al­ly ex­pand­ing to mar­kets out­side of T&T.

“As an im­port sub­sti­tu­tion we’ve done fair­ly well. The Eng­lish-speak­ing Caribbean is some­thing we have worked with in the past. We still have a few cus­tomers we’ve al­ready worked with in Ja­maica, Bar­ba­dos, but were now look­ing to re­grow that ex­port mar­ket and let those cus­tomers know right away that what they’re buy­ing is food safe.”

With these plans ahead, Moses says he’s con­fi­dent that the new cer­ti­fi­ca­tion and more im­por­tant­ly the qual­i­ty of the prod­ucts will be enough for suc­cess.