“Our vision is to take Samoa products to the world,” says Nathan Wilson, Director of Wilex Samoa.
“That was the founder, my father Tangaloa Eddie Wilson’s vision, to create a gateway for the Samoan people to get their crops out into the world. Obviously, you can’t do that right now competitively without adding value to the crops that we have growing in the islands.
“We have earmarked cocoa, noni and kava as some of the crops with the biggest potential, adding value to different products. With each crop item, we have created brands around the Pacific, and we did do some launches pre-COVID. We had a speed bump with a lot of the sales and all of the avenues that we launched to. We are looking at re-launching again properly, probably [this] December and January 2024.”
Wilex Samoa’s product line includes kava, noni juice and cocoa products. Their cocoa products range from chocolates to cocoa powders, cocoa nips, cocoa butter and cocoa liquor.
Wilson says they source from farmers all around Samoa. Wilex also works with the Samoa Cocoa Industry Association to train young farmers, supply seedlings and increase yields.
This includes encouraging multi-cropping. As Wilson says, diversification is more sustainable, and that “you’re not just taking and taking from the land and eventually the crop quality goes down.”
It does mean Wilex is paying a higher price for its raw inputs. “The international price of cocoa right now on the commodities market, if I was to buy cocoa in bulk from one of the big commercial countries like say Ghana or Ecuador who provide big bulk cocoa, their international price right now is US$2.78 per kilo whereas we pay our farmers almost US$4 per kilo.”
Markets
The company’s chocolate lines are mainly purchased by tourists visiting Samoa, but prior to COVID, they also sent product to Hawaii and other parts of the US, a market they plan to revive from Christmas this year.
“Pre-COVID, we were hand packing most of our chocolate products,” says Wilson. “In the islands, we don’t have the high-tech packaging equipment and stuff. It’s not as easily accessible in the islands to get good machines so now all of our chocolate machines are moulded by hand by our factory staff, and they are also de-moulded and then hand packed and wrapped with the packaging. It’s quite a tedious process but one of our mottos which is on the package is ‘Heaven sent with alofa from Samoa’, which means it’s made with a lot of love and care. We do believe that it also adds to what the customers are buying as a lot of love and care has been put into it.”
Unlike chocolate, the noni line is primarily exported.
“For the noni juice, it’s a whole different market. The noni juice is known as a health supplement, kind of like your vitamins. It gives you daily health benefits. There’s a lot of studies that show the benefits of the noni juice. And the markets for those are mostly the Asian markets, like Korea, Japan and also China. China is one of the emerging markets for noni juice.”
Organic certification
Wilson says while many of the farmers they work with are certified organic, “in the islands, it’s starting to be almost unfeasible for the smaller farmers to keep up with the organic certification. There are costs from the organic industries for them to come and certify each farmer, but to be honest, in the islands, most of the farmers are not at the level where they use commercial fertilisers and commercial sprayers and other stuff that people are worried about.
“We don’t have big commercial farms. We have small family farms; their biggest tool is their machete and their shovel.”
He says post-COVID, sales have started to pick up, but they are still not back to pre-COVID profit levels.
“The challenges in the manufacturing sector that we are seeing in Samoa at the moment are cost of materials and the cost of shipping,” says Wilson. “Everything is going up in price. One of our ingredients in making sweet, nice chocolate is sugar and also milk—we have seen an increases in those prices.
“Another major challenge that we are finding in the islands is that we are losing a lot of our workforce to seasonal work programmes which I know are important in developed countries, but we are losing a lot of our staff, our professional workforce and also our farmers to these seasonal programmes,” says Wilson.
“So, the challenge for us definitely is high costs, high cost of production, high cost of materials as well.”
Despite these challenges, Wilson says there is opportunity to break into new markets. The company’s chocolates are now stocked in Fiji duty free stores, and it is in discussion with New Zealand distributors.
“I’ve been in New Zealand, and I would describe it the same as when you look at the NZ mountains—the success goes up really high and then you have those lows,” says Wilson. “It’s been a rocky time for us—the measles in Samoa and then COVID and then losing our workforce—but with that being said, there’s always the silver lining and we believe that coming back we have to take what we are doing more seriously and try to not rely so much on what we were relying on pre-COVID. We are learning and growing. What doesn’t kill you makes you grow stronger. We believe we are in another gear now and we’ve got more products coming out that will help us be more sustainable to things like the pandemic and other economic downturns.”
