From survival to success
FOR many, starting and owning a business is the ultimate dream. You can call your own shots. Most times you can choose your own schedule and you definitely don’t have to answer to a jerk boss or interact with toxic co-workers.
But for Ronnetta Crooks Allen, managing director of RSS Naturalll Delites, starting her business was about simply survival. The name, RSS is the initial letter of her name and that of her two daughters.
The affable young woman from Old Harbour, St Catherine, produces a host of traditional Jamaican snacks and pastries, but getting the business started was not easy.
“My business started in 2017 when my husband moved out and left me as a single parent,” Crooks Allen shared with the Jamaica Observer.
When that happened, the stay-at-home mother of two said she had to find a way to survive the loss of her husband’s income which previously took care of the home and her children. Now she had to do it on her own.
Crooks Allen said she started first making and selling natural juices, but the sales at the time were disappointing. However, while that brought frustration, she said it also caused her to focus as she brainstorm what she could do to send her children to school, pay the bills and take care of herself.
Being a spiritual person, Crooks Allen said she took the disappointment to God in prayer, asking him for guidance on what she could do that will make enough money to do what she had to do — taking care of herself and two daughters being the priority.
“After that, the idea came to me to start doing coconut drops,” she told Sunday Finance.
“Now, I didn’t know how to make coconut drops. However, I had a neighbour who knew how to do it and I asked her to show me how to make the product. She showed me once and the second time, I bought the coconuts and I told her that I wanted to do it again. So she told me ‘alright, guess what you do, cut up the coconut, prepare it and everything.’ Now the lady didn’t come back until one hour after and being the type of person I am, I cannot wait on anyone, so I went ahead and started, doing what I saw her doing when she showed me how to make coconut drops the first time.”
But Crooks Allen said she eventually found out that her neighbours delay in turning up to help her make coconut drops was a test of her resolve. It was something the neighbour revealed later.
“When she came she said,
Ronetta Crooks Allen poses with some of her products. ‘Oh, you did it’ and I said yes, and she told me that she was teaching me how to survive and not wait on anyone.”
Since then, Crooks Allen said she grew in confidence making the products and started innovating, adding different elements such as almonds, sunflower seeds and sesame seeds to the coconut drops and being equally innovative with the other products she started to make. The business has also evolved in the variety of products on offer.
“We take the old time traditional Jamaican snacks and turn them into a new look with a new taste. We infuse a lot of different nuts with the coconut drops, cranberry gizzadas, peanut cakes, grater cakes with sesame seeds, sorrel jams with cayenne pepper and turmeric candies.”
In total, RSS Naturalll Delites has five different flavours of coconut drops. “We have