Hill Milling Company counting losses as raw materials dumped over rat discovery

Just over two months after environmental health authorities closed Hill Milling Company Limited because of a rat infestation, the owner of the food manufacturing and packaging plant says he has racked up losses of about $600 000 so far, including from raw materials he was forced to dump.

An emotional-sounding chief executive officer (CEO) of the company Richard Ashby told Barbados TODAY on Thursday that six more containers of materials are to be tossed by inspectors from the Environmental Health Department.

Saying that he believed he had eliminated the rodent problem, he lamented that his losses would continue to increase with every day his Haggatt Hall, St Michael plant remained closed.

“Nine weeks ago, they came and they saw some rats so they closed me down…. There is no production, no sales, no exports, no nothing. So their way of curtailing the rats is to clear the building of all food items…all raw material food items, which they have done. So now they decide they are going to start dumping. So they dumped one container this morning and they got about six more to dump,” Ashby said.

“So my customers, my staff are all suffering for products. My 52 staff were sent home on leave. Small shopkeepers all over Barbados are waiting for me to reopen. In my opinion, I have eliminated [the rats],” he said.

Ashby said that while he waits on environmental health authorities to give him the all-clear to reopen, his exports, the major revenue-earning portion of his business, continues to be in jeopardy.

“They are very slow in deciding what they want to do,” he said, adding that thousands of local and overseas customers were being deprived of his products which include rice, sugar, corn curls, oats, peas, beans and snacks.

“I sell to 4 000 shopkeepers…supermarkets, gas stations, mini marts…you know, people out in the country who sell from their windows, their back doors. But that’s not my big stuff. My big stuff is exports. So you are not only affecting small shops in Barbados but you are affecting the big shops in Guyana, Jamaica, St Lucia, Miami, New York and St Kitts,” the business owner contended.

Ashby said the affected aspects of the plant include milling, packaging and producing.

“I got 13 packaging machines in here, and all of them shut down for the last nine weeks. The supermarkets don’t have anything that I produce . . . so they will be out of all the stock…. All the supermarkets are out of all the peas, beans, rice corn meal…. Nobody has anything belonging to Hill Milling right now,” he complained.

When contacted, Chief Environmental Health Officer Francina Bascombe declined to comment and referred Barbados TODAY to Chief Medical Officer The Most Honourable Dr Kenneth George who could not be reached.

While not identifying Hill Milling Company Limited by name, public relations officer at the Sanitation Service Authority Carl Alf Padmore said a two-and-a-half-hour controlled burn was conducted in the Mangrove Pond Landfill in Vaucluse, St Thomas, partly to assist the Ministry of Health “in disposing of condemned foods from an establishment in Barbados”.

He said used and discarded mattresses were also destroyed in the burning exercise which was observed by representatives of the Ministry of Health, the Barbados Defence Force and the Barbados Fire Service.

emmanueljoseph@barbadostoday.bb