D’ Market Movers prove local food is high-quality

THE PROOF in the plantain is in the frying.

Believe it or not, people can tell the difference between a local plantain and one that comes from abroad, especially when they eat.

“A plantain grown in Trinidad and Tobago will always taste sweeter to us, because we are from this soil,” said Gerard Marquez, head chef at Our Moving Table, one of the companies in D’ Market Movers Ltd Group of companies.

“If you take a plantain from the Dominican Republic or one from Miami, it would be drier. It wouldn’t be as supple or as sweet. You wouldn’t get a real nice fried plantain, where it's burnt on the outside and soft and nice on the inside and if you eat it too hot it will stick to your tongue.”

It's the same with all food. Imported cauliflower, for example, has significant differences in colour, flavour and even longevity when compared to local cauliflower, as imported cauliflower may spoil faster. The fact is, the things that grow in our soil are best for our bodies.

Since Market Movers Ltd Group started in 2009, co-founders, Rachel Rennie and David Thomas have been proving local food has better taste and quality than imported food.

The business started in Tunapuna, in Rennie's mother's porch, with only ten online customers. Now, they have a customer base of more than 10,000 with a portfolio of products that expanded from 25, when they started, to more than 1,000 retail products.

They are also exporting to the Dominican Republic and Barbados through their frozen-goods line, Farm and Function, with the coal of reaching as far as Europe. They also assist other food companies with marketing through MM Designs. Additionally, the group’s farm-to-table roving restaurant service, Our Moving Table, serves meals made from 95 per cent local food and produce. The restaurant moves to different locations, bringing dishes to the customer instead of having the customer come to the restaurant.

As one of the country's first click-and-collect stores, making more than 500,000 deliveries and selling north of 1.5 million pounds of fresh, home-grown food in the past decade, Market Movers Ltd Group is proving daily that locally grown food is simply better.

A passion for food

Speaking to Business Day, Rennie and Thomas said their business is based on their mutual passion for food.

Their entire staff of 20, who include physical store workers, manufacturers who produce the frozen goods and a design team, all share the same passion.

Rennie said she and her brother, Ravi Rennie, chief merchant officer, hail from St Helena, where their grandfather grew sugar cane and rice. She said they inherited a network from their grandfather that helped them, but also found farmers at different municipal markets.

Rennie said, “There has to be this common thread and a common passion to have a good business. For us, that is food. So once it has something to do with food, we just gravitate towards it. When someone says they don’t like something, I usually ask, well have you tried it this way?

“Anything around food, I am always interested, because it is a way to be creative and express yourself; and I found someone who was just as interested as me.”

Thomas said dealing with people who produce food comes naturally to him.

“Not everyone likes to go to the market. I love to do it. Even though I am in this business I still go on Saturdays, just for going’s sake. That’s my ‘me time.’”

They both worked together at the same bank in 2006. Thomas, from Las Cuevas, would take fish orders from co-workers at the bank, get the fish and deliver it.

“Thomas knows good fish. My family was actually in agriculture through our grandparents and my brother was growing seasoning, so I told David we could get some herbs and put it with the fish and sell it at work,” Rennie said.

Rennie eventually went to college in New York, and Thomas left the bank and bought a boat and began fishing. While in New York she saw how businesses operated online and when she returned from college she began helping Thomas by setting up spreadsheets for orders that customers would fill out. Thomas would then source the produce and deliver it.

They noted the demand for fresh food and saw the opportunity to give people access.

“When we first started we were giving people the gift of time, because we were providing access and we had food delivered to you. On Saturday morning you could sleep in late, instead of going to the market.”

The Market Movers’ website was the first e-commerce distribution company of greengroceries in TT, using its network of over 300 farmers to provide farm-to-table service.

“Our strength is our team,” Ravi said. “We know the people that produce and cook food. We know the people who enjoy eating. With that network we have something unmovable.”

Rennie said while some local food is grown with pesticides, the amount of pesticides used is no more than imported food. She added that their network of farmers are GAP certified.

GAP is short for "good agricultural practices," which are operational measures developed by the Ministry of Agriculture, Land and Fisheries, the TT Bureau of Standards the Food and Agricultural Society of the UN and other stakeholders, which minimises risk to food safety. The standard establishes the minimum requirements to properly produce fresh fruits, vegetables, herbs, spices and root crops.

They also have a network of farmers who grow food pesticide-free, using biologically-based inputs designed from enzymes, plant extracts and microorganisms and macro-organisms .

"We also do site visits and provide support like soil testing, irrigation planning, capacity building climate resilience and tech integration," she said.

From farm to foreign

Having a successful and sustainable business requires more than passion, a fact that Rennie recognised early. As a result the company was involved with several initiatives that supported SMEs, such as Nedco’s Yes programme, UTC’s Scale Up programme and ExporTT’s Export Accelerator Programme in 2021.

They were part of the first cohort of the Accelerator Programme and Scale Up.

“I think one of the biggest lessons we learned was, love your business, but don’t fall in love with it,” Rennie said. “When you love something or someone you would ensure they were doing the right things for themselves, and recognising this is what makes a good entrepreneur.“We always absorbed information about business whenever we can. Wherever there were people that knew about business, that was where we need to be.”

Gabriella Gonzales, sales and export manager at Farm and Function, said it was critical for the company to expand to other markets in the region, having studied the local market.

“When the brand expands you then create scenarios in the background where the farmers we work with have more volumes. They live better as a result,” With the guidance from Scale Up and the Export Accelerator Programme, the company was able to comply with all the regulations to begin export within the region. Farm and Function’s range of frozen foods, distributed by Supreme Distributors in Barbados and HVV Whitchurch and Co, Ltd in Dominica, have earned US$50,000 in export sales since it started exporting in 2022.

Rennie said about 20 per cent of their sales now come from exports.

Gonzales added that aside from Dominica and Barbados, the company is also in talks to expand to Jamaica. She said the company’s entry into Barbados was fast-tracked through the programmes, with ExporTT identifying a suitable market in Barbados, and, shortly after, a distribution company taking up the product.

Now, they have bigger ambitions, making efforts to enter into the European market through ExporTT’s Fit for Europe programme.

“Usually when you feel comfortable in your own market that is a sign that you should expand to others,” she said. “That is what we wanted for Farm and Function, to open more markets and move out.”

“At the end of the day the company always felt this product was part of the whole idea of us preserving the Caribbean way of life and to expand the volumes outwards and make things accessible.”

Caribbean quality you can taste

Thomas said while there is a perception that imported foods are of higher quality, when people try local foods, their opinions change quickly.

“The customer can tell the quality of the produce the best,”

“For the past six-eight months, I have only taken plantains that were not sprayed and had no riping agents. Plantain sales have gone up since then; they have almost doubled. People have realised that when this plantain goes through the process and they cook it they could taste the difference."

He said some people may not know the difference in quality until it is shown to them. Images on social media may be enticing, but, he said, when people taste it, there is a difference between how it is supposed to taste and the reality.

“I remember tasting the frozen fruit from one of our competitors and I wondered how people actually ate it. In contrast, some of the customers I know simply open our packs and give it to their children; or they eat it like a snack, as opposed to products that just taste like frozen syrup.”

This was the most apparent during the covid19 lockdowns, where people could not get their usual access to good food. Rennie said the morning after the first night of the lockdown, they received a month’s worth of orders.

“It was like that every day for the year,” she said. “Several people really struggled with food during the lockdown.

While the group could not run its Moving Table brand during lockdown, Marquez went to the processing factory with a ring stove and gas, and began preparing vegan to-go meals for customers.

“We started doing 'wellness Wednesday' meals. Regular people were buying it and saying that they didn’t even miss the meat. We were showing people that eating local vegetables is not boring.”

Rennie said as a result the group has plans to include to-go meals from the produce it gets from local farmers as an expansion of its product portfolio, and is already providing meals such as fruit bowls, smoothies and parfaits for corporate companies. This expansion, she said, is expected to add value to that aspect.

Ultimately, D’Market Movers Ltd Group is all about providing good local food to a range of markets, and changing the perception of local as compared to imported foods.

“We know what is good food,”
Ravi Rennie said. “Thomas could see a bunch of plantains and say, 'That is the plantain I want to take.' When we go to Matura and I say we are bringing down plantains, we know what tree that come from, we know if it is sprayed or not, and that is one of the strengths of our team.

“Food and agriculture is our lives. We believe in agriculture, we believe in Caribbean food. We believe in eating local. In our families, from our parents to our own children, this has been our history. We want to continue that and make that our legacy.”