Back in August, we told you about the week-long forced shut-down of Caribbean Chicken due to the death of a COVID positive member of staff.
It was a shut-down that - coupled with a nationwide chicken shortage - threatened the entire poultry industry and forced competitor Quality Poultry to pick up the slack.
Today General manager Raymond Barkman was happy to announce the end of the chicken shortage as well as some much-needed celebratory sales. He spoke to Cherisse Halsall via zoom and explained why his company wasn't crushed under the chicken demand.
Raymond Barkman - Quality Poultry
"We like a month ago maybe or something and then we were in the middle of a chicken shortage and as of today there's a relief that the chicken shortage is over and in fact so much so that we're actually giving back again to celebrate the 39th Birthday of Belize so that is where we are."
Cherisse Halsall
"Take me back a little bit to when your main competitor had to shut down due to COVID what did you guys have to do the kick in to pick up the slack of them being completely shut down?"
Raymond Barkman
"Well, and again that was really thought, I don't wish any company to have to go through that ever and that was the time when we were getting there with the chicken so we were able to help out so much at least so that I don't think anyone noticed any shortage during that week, at least not an emergency and also bearing in mind that now that the restaurants are still shut down and whatever there is still a decrease in sales so with the restaurants being shut down you didn't feel the shortage as quick with the competitor being shut down, you know there just wasn't that much activity with everything open and running and so forth. There were a lot of people saying that we were using it to hike up the price and that sort of stuff and so I do want to say this that quality poultry, meaning my company here has not gone up with any price changes. As I mentioned before we're with all of you hope you'll be with all of us for this tough times, so we did not raise any prices during this time and not plan to in the future. So I just want to clarify that nothing like that happened with our company."
"As you know the last time we talked we were in a shortage and as I previously mentioned we live on 9 weeks in advance schedule so with COVID this opening-closing ---opening it back up again shutting down the restaurant this is just something that's a nightmare for a processing company like ours where we have to do estimates or guesstimates and so forth 9 weeks in advance so it's just really hard to juggle the opening and closing and especially as I already mentioned the restaurants but we have ---through it and I feel very confident to say that as you know we hadn't had a chicken shortage in 50 years but now we did and I think we're back on track to that same path unless of course there's another pandemic which I don't guarantee chicken shortages anymore for pandemics but other than that I feel pretty safe about it."
And to celebrate Belize's 39th independence anniversary, Quality Poultry has promotional sales.
