A flavourful journey of a natural product – SS Natural Fruit Flavour

SS Natural Fruit Flavour is now a household name in Guyana, providing divinely tasting barbeque sauces. These bottles happen to be found at many of your local barbeque joints and gives your meat the extra zest it deserves, for a mouth-watering meal. But this brand was developed through years of testing.

SS Natural Flavours has that unique touch as it is a product crafted by a mother and son duo, with their abundance of love.

Sandra Craig and her son, Shemroy Craig, started the journey of this prolific product in 2012 and through testing, trial and error, birthed that stupendous barbeque sauce we all know and love today, that has touched the lives of thousands of Guyanese.

Shemroy Craig explained the start of the successful trip.

"Me and my mom had a snackette in Orange Walk, Bourda and we started having food and stuff like that and then we reached out to the public because we wanted to do something different that nobody was doing on Orange Walk at that time. I myself reached out to the public and we went around asking people what they think we should do and some of them said barbecue and what’s not.

So, I wen back to mom and say mom most people want barbeque chicken, so as mom is she jumped on it and we started producing barbeque chicken for the public."

However, at first the sauce produced by the duo was not the cutting edge. The first few batches were made of natural ingredients and a mixture of other barbeque sauces, which had little success, but the family did not down tools in the face of this setback.

Rather, Shemroy’s mother had other plans.

"We used to use like other people barbecue sauce to mix with our ingredients that mom had. We do that one, two, three times and mom, being the genius she is, started making her own barbecue sauce without the other people barbecue sauce inside."

"We started to push that product which she had there, which was pineapple barbeque sauce she first started with. And we go out back to the public and ask how is the Barbeque chicken and they said it was really good and that you guys should continue and from since then mom and I never looked back.”

The business took flight since then, boasting seven flavours today; Mango, Pineapple, Golden Apple, Passion Fruit, Soursop, Tamarind and Ginger & Garlic.

The elder Craig, Sandra, has dedicated lots of time and energy investing in Guyana’s agro-processing sector, producing high-valued, tasty and a naturally made line of products.

She believes that the agro-processing industry is super beneficial to Guyanese, at a time when many people are becoming more health-conscious, which gives her company an advantage over competitors.

“We have so many organic fruits in this country that we utilise that many countries don’t do it and that’s one of the most advantage we will have because we do fruits that will give benefits to people when they eat them and everybody wants to be healthy, they want to eat healthy. So, we have the raw materials that we can be able to put out there in different products.”

The enterprising family believes that opportunities must be seized, whenever they are present.