What started as a fish mongering mother’s request for a helping hand from her daughter has gradually blossomed into a sea foods processing company that currently processes and supplies all kinds of sea foods to hotels and restaurants. Maxwell Adombila Akalaare looks at the ‘how’ of the Visap Sea Foods Processing company and the brain behind it.
FOR many people in Ghana, continuing with a family member’s profession is, perhaps a difficult task and a headache that many do not want to be associated with. And that could simply be because many people think that the professions of family members should at least not also be ‘lineage’: After all, individual family members have differently unique talents if not callings to which they must respectively respond to.
But, for Mrs Vida Sarpong, the founder and now overseer of Visap Sea Foods Company at Tema in Accra, ‘snow-balling” family professions to the future generations are better not cut-off the family hooks.
She told the GRAPHIC BUSINESS that her present profession of processing and supplying all kinds of sea foods to a number of hotels and restaurants within Accra was “bequeathed” to her by her late mother who was a fish-monger
Tracing events that gradually pushed her to her present position, founder and oversee of the operations of the Visap Foods, Mrs Sarpong said as a teenager growing up with her mother, she use to help her in her business.
But as time went on, Mrs Sarpong, decided to start nurturing her own with all the risks associated with it. “Each time I returned from school - during the holidays, I would also go and buy some of the fish, smoke it and go around supplying it within the neighbour hood”.
THE WHITEMEN-CUSTOMERS
For a young lady who was committed to ‘her smoked fish hawking business’, parading the streets with her product, smoked fish was not a big deal to handle. As a result, her customers cut across all manners of people, across different sections and even geographical boundaries.
According to her, she had on one of her ‘hawking sprees’ stumbled upon ”some white men who came to buy fish from her, but because they didn’t have the money to pay for the fish, she had to follow them to their premises for the money.
“And when I got to their place, I realised that they were exporters and they where actually going to export the fish that they had bought from me,” Mrs Sarpong recounted to the paper amidst smiles.
These customers said she lacked the adequate knowledge about the fish quality and the type that was good for the export market.
She therefore took the opportunity, pieced together her expertise from the fish industry, with the little formal education that she had acquired about the fish industry and “educated them on the type and quality of smoked fish that can be exported.
She said the white men acknowledged her education on he right fish for export and subsequently agreed that she supplied them the fish for export.
During those days, Mrs Sarpong said she had also opened up business doors with Marx Mart, a shopping mall in Accra which subsequently gave her the opportunity to supply fish to the mall and also wholesale some to retailers.
THE CURIOSITY THAT PAYS
While supplying fish to her newly discovered white-customers, Mrs Sarpong said she also observed how they use to do the processing of the fish before exporting them.
And since then, Mrs Sarpong’s ambition of adding colour to her mother’s profession of fish mongering opened the doors to supply processed fish to some hotels and restaurants throughout the Greater Accra Region.
She said the company does virtually a weekly supply of the products to hotels and restaurants and added that her Visap Sea Food Processing was also into the wholesaling of the “processing of all kinds of sea foods to retailers for onward selling to individual customers.”
According to Mrs Sarpong, her outfit also intends to bequeath her current profession of processing and supplying sea foods to her children and expressed the hope that her children would do a better job than she is currently doing.
At the moment, Mrs Sarpong said the company was currently getting its stocks from “some Chinese vessels at the ports and sometimes from the canoes.”
But those supplies, Mrs Sarporg said was still below the company’s capacity to supply to its growing clients.
She mentioned that the company was currently striving to import the sea foods as she aims at expanding to meet the growing demand for its products across the country, adding that it was her ambition to “make Visap Foods the number one supplier of sea foods in the country.
A BETTER-HALF’S PUSH
According to Mrs Sarpong, the perishable nature of sea products makes working in the fish sector “very tensed.”
“Sometimes if there is an order and you miss it, it makes you become so tensed such that it can easily break your heart” and stressed that “I always have courage and trust in God”.
Though Mrs Sarpong can only rely on Almighty God for a push to her business, she easily and perhaps, quickly finds cover under her supportive husband’s arms whenever the perishable nature of her products strikes.
She said her husband, Mr Ebenezer Akofi Sarpong, who stepped down from his job to enable him offer full support to her wife’s business has been very supportive to me and the business.
“Even if I sometimes don’t want to do something, my husband would motivate me to do it. He left his job just to come and help me in the business and I think that is very good”, she stated
Mr Sarpong also told the GRAPHIC BUSINESS that men needed to develop patience to be able to cope with the always busy nature of their business wives.
He further called on men who are married to businesswomen to “try and help women who have the foresight to achieve what they wanted to achieve”.
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