Another proud Pinoy entrepreneur

It’s not very often we meet up close an entrepreneur who sits at the helm of a progressive Filipino company, one that continues to leave its mark on the food business, who gives as much weight to the passion she has for her business as much as her social concern for the less privileged.

Meet Clara Reyes-Lapus of the famous Reyes clan, the family that brought the iconic Aristocrat Restaurant, which incidentally, is celebrating its 80th year in 2016. Clara graduated with a degree in architecture, but she did not pursue this as a career.  She self-deprecatingly says there is no dearth of good architects in the Philippines, so she is surely no loss to the profession.  Instead, she chose to dig deep into the food business that her mother, Teresita Reyes-Reyes from Bulacan started.

The family matriarch, Mama Sita as she was known, was a real foodie when the word was not even invented yet.  She came from a family of 11 siblings and she herself begot 11 children, so she spent a lot of time in the kitchen. The family knew every new season brought familiar comfort food—when guavas were in season, they would surely have sinigang sa bayabas on the table.

In the ’70s, the family had their first foray into the food business via the Fiesta brand Sarsang Lechon which became quite successful. But it was only in 1980 that Mama Sita, the brand, was born. A brother-in-law, a missionary based in Madrid, commented that for anyone to enjoy authentic Pinoy food, it took a whole day of sweaty labor in the kitchen to pull it off. Remember that back then, if one wanted to eat sinigang sa sampaloc, one had to go through the traditional way of boiling and sieving the fruits to form the paste to sour the broth. This led her mother, Mama Sita to think loudly:  why not come up with instant food mixes for sinigang and karekare, that iconic Pinoy dish that is never absent from the table when there is an important occasion? And that was the start of Mama Sita’s famous sinigang and kare-kare mix where they use the right variety of local peanuts to achieve that flavor and aroma.

Clara herself drove to supermarkets and stores to deliver the mixes, but the long credit terms, from 90 days to as long as a year, were not ideal for a small company like Mama Sita’s. She also has sad stories to tell about bulk buyers who never paid her, and of dealing with consolidators, businessmen who filled up their trucks with various products to sell, and remembers that Mama Sita boxes sat alongside products like walis tingting for retail. So it was a natural progression that she chose to concentrate on the export market and go into a distribution arrangement with a well-established company, Monde Nissin, to serve the domestic market. Her exports constitute 90 percent of her total business.

But before she was able to entrench herself in the business, she joined DTI trade fairs where she met more buyers.  Her siblings helped promote the new products in their own loving way, bringing along packs of Mama Sita abroad for personalized cooking demos to Filipino communities. But even the foreign markets presented huge challenges to this persistent entrepreneur.  She remembers the time when US President Roland Reagan suddenly prescribed a quota for foods that contain sugar. So she found her export of tocino just lounging in the pier and could not be unloaded.  The quota, she said, was easily gobbled up by Canada on the very first day of the quota enforcement, so businesses like hers had no fighting chance. Upon the advice of the Philippine Trade Attache, she hired an American lawyer and lobbied with each of the US congressmen who realized that hers was a small business and eventually allowed her products to enter the country.

There was also a time in 1988 that achuete, which she uses a lot of, was disallowed in some countries when used for meat products, but allowed for desserts only, another non-tarriff barrier that she also eventually hurdled.

Now, Mama Sita is found in 46 countries, and the company continues to develop new products like the latest all-natural distilled cane vinegar with its distinctive aroma, much preferred over the petrochemical vinegar.Her biologist husband is currently researching on how to better propagate our local ube, and is developing new products for the elderly.  They started mass production in 2002 and they have mechanized their business well, citing her engineer brother-in-law for fabricating machines like the ones they use to extract the juice from achuete, for instance.

And what does she want to tell our young entrepreneurs? “Don’t take out loans!” She remembers the time when she had to borrow P100,000 from a bank at a modest interest rate to put up their very first plant in Mandaluyong, not realizing that the fine print provided for as much 30% interest/penalties for delays in payment. Because of her export market, she had to graduate from being a cottage industry to operating from a fully-mechanized plant. During those days, the family lived very frugally, providing another nugget of wisdom from her:  live only with what you have.

One of the secrets to her success is how she continues to support her farmer-suppliers, helping them mechanize to make them competitive, and paying them the right price for their produce. Her concern for the hapless farmers extends to other less-privileged Filipinos.  She assails the “Asin Law”, a Dept. of Health initiative to push for iodized salt over our own all-natural sea salt. It came to a point, she said, that trucks carrying native salt were apprehended, thus effectively killing the salt industry of farmers from Pangasinan, Mindoro and other coastal areas, while countries like Japan disallows entry of products containing iodized salt in their labels.  And while she hails many of the Bangko Sentral’s economic policies, she says many of BSP’s monetary policies aimed at buoying up the Philippine peso marginalize the poor even further because they result in higher prices and hopes these will be reviewed.

That’s B&L’s latest Proud Pinoy entrepreneur, Mrs. Clara Reyes-Lapus of Mama Sita’s.

Mabuhay!!!  Be proud to be a Filipino.

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