Royal Chicken multi-million dollar brand going places: Feed production plant, tunnel rearing on the cards
If you mention the brand Royal Chicken in a conversation about the local poultry industry you will probably not get the kind of knee jerk response that some other brands elicit. And yet the product of Mohammed’s Farm, a twenty-four–year-old family business headquartered at 60 Garden of Eden, East Bank Demerara is one of the leading players in the country’s poultry sector; and if its plans for growth and expansion are what the company’s General Manager Rasheed Baksh say they are then sooner rather than later this fastemerging giant is bound to become a household name among consumers..
You wouldn’t have thought that a multi-million dollar poultry establishment that slaughters between 50,000 and 60,000 birds per week, delivers chicken parts across the coastal regions of Guyana in six refrigerated trucks, extends its delivery service as far as Lethem was built from ground up by Shameer Mohammed, still in his forties, would have such a low profile.
You probably wouldn’t have thought, either, that Mohamed’s Farm has its origin in an operation comprising fifty birds, a small freezer and a modest distribution involving small shops in the immediate neighbourhood. By 2012 the firm had done well enough to acquire a poultry plucking and processing plant and the following year, a Hatchery. That was the same year in which the Royal Chicken brand was launched after which customers as far as Charity, Molsen Creek and Linden began to benefit from chicken supplies free of delivery costs.
These days, Mohamed’s Farm and its more than 200 employees have spread themselves over two locations. Its operations at Yarrowkabra on the Soesdyke/Linden Highway are dedicated to the rearing of chickens whilst the Garden of Eden base houses the hatchery and processing plant.
In September, Mohammed’s Farm turned up at the Guyana Trade and Investment Exhibition (GuyTIE) aiming, seemingly, to up its marketing appeal at a time when the possibilities of further increasing its market share are probably as good as they have ever been. Baksh, an Accountant who is presently pursuing an MBA, admits that setting aside the opportunities afforded for the expansion of local market share the brand is eyeing the prospects of securing markets outside of Guyana as well as benefitting from the Local Content opportunity associated with the country’s emerging oil and gas industry.
A leaflet circulated by Mohammed’s Farm at the GuyTIE event attributes its success to what it says is the “bond of trust and reliability” created with customers. That, however, is only part of the story. The evidence on the ground suggests that much of the key to what the