Denyse Perkins tours the construction site of the new Walkerswood Caribbean Food factory in St. Ann. The facility will feature a tourism centre offering product tasting, mini spice lessons and factory tours. - Contributed
ASK DENYSE Perkins about Jamaican spice and you're likely to get a treatise on the merits of one spice over the other and the fine details of their properties.
Spice is life for the woman who has creatively cooked up a career using Jamaican spices. In the process, she has developed a range of signature products for the well-known Walkerswood Caribbean Food line.
Born Denyse Sumpter in Spanish Town, St. Catherine, to a Jamaican mother and an English father, she was orphaned at age seven and spent her formative years in Trinidad with her mother's oldest sister, Eric Recile, and her husband Hugh.
ADDING TO THE WALKSERWOOD LINE
She completed high school in Trinidad and studied dietetic and restaurant management in the United States. She returned to Jamaica after a decade abroad, working in the hospitality and tourism industry, first at several north coast hotels before taking charge of the dietary department of the St. Ann's Bay Hospital. She did a stint at Burger Kings, Ocho Rios; was the manager at Dunn's River Falls for six years; and then landed at Walkers-wood, the wife of Earl Perkins, a native of the community.
Shortly after her arrival, Perkins was elected president of the Walkerswood Community Development Foundation. Since 1993, she has used her love of spices to add to the Walkerswood line for example, hot pepper sauce, Firestick and Las Lick.
She recently moved from product development to head the tourism arm of Walkerswood Caribbean Foods.
IN HER OWN WORDS ...
We are committed to the development of products that use raw material from the community and from all over Jamaica. This is how we sustain and support Walkerswood.
I'm a little disappointed when I present a sauce I feel is perfect and someone says "It's not quite right".
However, the cooperative community approach is invaluable there is no better testing ground and when the team says it's perfect, you know it is.
