Published in: Case Study

Case Study- Turner Innovations Limited

Author admin

Published on: August 27, 2018

“Perseverance is everything.” For Oral and Allison Turner, this statement captures the essence of their journey as serial entrepreneurs, and especially as inventors of ‘The Sorrel Deseeder’.

The couple, who have been married for more than 15 years, live and work in Comma Pen, St Elizabeth. Oral, born and raised in St Elizabeth, is a welder by trade. He comes from a background of family farming, runs a farm supplies store and has a knack for reverse-engineering. Allison, born and raised in the United Kingdom to a Trinidadian mother and a Jamaican father, came to Jamaica in 2000 to find her roots. She also found love, and an outlet for her skills in graphic design, administration and marketing.

Bright Idea from a Dark Situation

One day, in 2008, one of Oral’s customers came into the store, lamenting the fact that he was going to have to abandon four acres of sorrel as it would cost so much to reap that the profit would be negligible. Separating the red calyxes (flesh) from the seed bud is the most labour intensive—thus most expensive—aspect of reaping sorrel.

Typically, farmers employ labourers to hand-strip the buds, or use a broken umbrella stick to push the seed up and through the base of the bud. The latter method is the most widely used, but as one can imagine, it is very time consuming, which drives up harvesting costs.

It was a dark situation for the farmer, but it suddenly sparked a bright idea for Oral. He started bringing sorrel home, and began tinkering with various household items and appliances, trying to find a way to cut the cost of harvesting by automating the process of separating the flesh from the seeds. Allison, usually the optimist, didn’t initially see the vision, and begged him to leave it alone—especially as her kitchen items, broomsticks and even furniture legs were going missing or being maimed in the process of Oral’s experimentation. It’s not every day that someone invents a machine, and certainly not in Jamaica, she cautioned.

Besides, if such a machine were to be invented, surely it would have been done already. Perhaps determined to prove his wife wrong, Oral persisted. He even ran a light out into the back garden, and spent many a night working outside.

Seeing the Possibilities 

Three months later, he had done it. He had successfully created the first prototype of a sorrel harvesting machine. “When I saw this machine, I thought there was still a little man in there plucking the sorrel with an umbrella stick,” Allison laughed. “I just couldn’t believe it. I went online to check if there was anything like it in the world and came up with nothing, so I got excited because I realised that this was going to have an impact on the whole industry. And it kind of scared me, because this was bigger than anything I could imagine. So, I decided that we needed real help; we needed the country to back us on this. But I didn’t believe Jamaica had any kind of facility for invention.”

Perseverance became the watchword as the couple spent the next seven years developing the idea and their business model. “As inventors, we faced an extra challenge to make a business plan that was usable, as data is limited, because the business is the first of its kind,” Allison recalled. “Projections were basically pie-in-the-sky. Also unlike most business models that can be based on similar businesses, with invention, you can reach any point in the process of development and have to stop your plan and start all over again from scratch.”

That’s exactly what happened to the Turners.

The Funding Conundrum

Being serial entrepreneurs, the Turners first sought to remain independent with their new invention. “We were working on it during the day and doing karaoke seven nights a week for a living. We just believed that we were going to have to do this ourselves. It’s only when we realised that we had to get the patent made non-provisional and we were going to need help, that we started reaching out,” Allison explained.

They were excited about the possibilities, Allison having done her research, but what they ended up walking into was a brick wall. “We did the Denbigh Agricultural Show that first year and they told us, ‘This isn’t going anywhere; leave it alone.’ We were deflated, but we were determined to make it happen, to prove them wrong,” she recalled. The banks and financial institutions were not interested, and the couple bounced around for a year, hearing nothing but ‘no,’ even after some representatives got their hopes up by visiting them to check out the machine. “It was a horrible experience. They just didn’t see the vision.”

FirstAngelsJA to the Rescue

That’s when Allison sought help from then Minister of Agriculture, the late Roger Clarke, and got connected with the Development Bank of Jamaica (DBJ). In December 2010, the Turners showed Roger the basic prototype. It was very rough, but he saw the possibilities and introduced them to the DBJ. In the meantime, Allison sought business training and enrolled at the Branson Centre of Entrepreneurship – Caribbean in 2011. Later that year, the DBJ came on board, providing J$3 million in grant funding that enabled the Turners to produce a more professional prototype of the machine and seek a US patent. The Sorrel Harvesting Machine was granted a US patent in December 2016, after five years of applying.

The rest, as they say, is history. In 2014, the DBJ suggested that they pitch the business idea to the FirstAngels network, and on May 22, 2015, they made the pitch at Stephen Facey’s office and five investors agreed to provide funding in two tranches. “To be able to impact an industry as big as agriculture, which is vital to Jamaica, was very attractive to them. And we had already been backed by the DBJ, so the potential had already been recognised. Jamaica is known for agriculture. It’s a great area to invest in, especially with the impact of our invention,” Allison reasoned. “Besides, how many times in your lifetime will you meet an inventor? Much less one from Jamaica?”

The Turners were ecstatic to meet like minds and be taken seriously. “Entrepreneurship is a dreamer’s world, so the only people who can understand it are people who have followed their dreams and had the opportunities and been blessed enough to be able to finance those dreams and move forward,” Allison reasoned. “We needed a different mindset to look at our vision, to be able to understand it and help us achieve it.”

 With the assistance of investors Joseph M. Matalon, Sandra Glasgow and Canadian design engineer Grant Seabrook, the Turners were able to redesign the machine, and secure a second round of investment from FirstAngels’ members in February 2017. Expressing special appreciation for Grant, who visited Jamaica to see the Deseeder first-hand, Allison noted: “When he saw how much work my husband had already put into this invention, he was blown away. By the time he left us, he’d decided to help us upgrade and redesign to a complete commercial version, fully computerised. He did that for us pro bono. You just can’t put a value on that.”

From Slow-Down to RevUP

Then came the COVID-19 pandemic, and a consequent “pause” from angel investors who had to focus on navigating the pressures placed on their own businesses by the global lockdown. Undaunted and determined, the Turners made a bold decision. “We decided not to pause,” Allison recounted. “We enrolled in a DBJ course for a year that offered mentorship, and funding for development in areas we needed. Through the course, we chose to work with the Caribbean Maritime Unit’s Digital Innovation & Advanced Manufacturing Centre, where we upgraded our design.”

Armed with their new design, the Turners went back to their investors in November 2021, and learned about RevUP, the Caribbean’s first virtual incubator, designed to provide accelerated mentorship and training for entrepreneurs. Already familiar with some of the investors, they completed the 5-month business incubation programme. They had formed a partnership with Tru-Juice in June 2021, and by December, they did proof of concept. True to the training progamme’s moniker, the rev-up had begun. By April 2022, they were able to send their new machine design to the US to be upgraded and by January 2023, they had a minimum viable product (MVP).

“We identified 10 buyers to field-test our MVP machine,” said Allison. “We manufactured 10 units locally in July 2023 and partnered with four buyers in Australia. We offered discounted rates to gain test data and the customer experience in a safe environment.” Phase 1 of the programme ran from December 2023 to May 2024. It was a success and they used the data to further develop the six remaining units in stock. Phase 2 was launched in June 2024, and they have already sold three units to Jamaican farmers and one unit to The Ministry of Agriculture and Fisheries, who will be using and testing the machines during the upcoming sorrel season in December 2024. “Pending the results of Phase 2 testing, we’ll start manufacturing on a larger scale for the global market,” Allison explained, noting that international interest in the machine has been strong. Currently, they have requests from 30 different sub-tropical sorrel-growing countries covering Africa, Asia, North America and Australia.

Insights on the Journey

All told, the Sorrel Harvesting Machine has taken the better part of a decade to produce and perfect. Even after getting the funding to get their invention made and commercialised, the  Turners had to address the question of how to earn revenue while the machine was being refined and improved. Allison recalled how their first meeting with the FirstAngelsJA board was especially eye-opening. The Turners’ first business plan had, of course, featured earning projections based on what they thought the machine would be able to do. With the Angels now on board, they had to show how those projections would be met, and to their chagrin, it wouldn’t have been able to produce even one-third of the projections, prompting one board member to quip that the couple might as well be “selling peanuts on the roadside”. The business plan had been solely focused on generating income from harvesting, and that was neither realistic nor worthwhile for either party.

“My husband was using a lot of sorrel to practice the making of the machine, and we had all this dried sorrel on our dining table. I was totally deflated from that first board meeting, but I looked at it and I thought, ‘I wonder…’” Allison’s inner graphic designer came back to the fore, and she hit the internet, Googling labels for products made from cranberries, which have some of the same properties as sorrel. Inspired, she began to design. After creating the Turners’ Choice label, “I went to the supermarket and asked them if they could seal it in a bag for me. The gentleman who did it came back and said, ‘When can we get this on the shelf?’” This was close to Christmas time, when sorrel consumption is at its highest in Jamaica, so he determined that it would sell well, and sell it did.

Making sorrel products had not been a part of the plan initially, but at the time it was just what was needed. At the second board meeting a month later, the Turners walked in and dropped the proverbial mic with their new product. “The meeting had begun at 7:30am, and by 9 o’ clock, we sat down at PA Benjamin and had an international distributor, and the biggest distributor in Jamaica, Facey Commodity, on board,” Allison marvelled. “This is part of the absolutely amazing power of an Angel Network like FirstAngels —knowing people and getting through doors. Within the first six months, we’d sold about $1.5 million worth of product.” They then added ready-to-eat snack products to the Turner’s Choice family—candied sorrel and candied sorrel with almonds, with plans to produce a specialty bottled sorrel sauce.

Their Turner’s Choice dried and candied sorrel products earned them one of two winner spots in the Best Food Product category of the 2017 Observer Food Awards, but  the couple made a deliberate decision to move away from the public eye after that. “We diversified and expanded our portfolio by making sorrel products because the machine development side of the business had slowed down. We had some measured success, but in the end, decided to refocus on the invention,” noted Allison. “I constantly had to remind myself that this journey was bigger than us and our personal success. We have a responsibility to our potential customers and investors – we promised we would deliver.”

A Word of Advice

In addition to funding, FirstAngels also provides investees with networking opportunities, mentorship, advice, and assistance with governance. This includes setting up a board of directors, and having regular meetings. This involvement has been a key part of the Turner Innovations journey. “We just could not have achieved any kind of success, in the time span that we have, without the Angels. It wasn’t just about money. It’s about experience, business knowledge, mentorship, guidance, support and belief. Their belief in us has been vital,” Allison said.

Giving thanks for the journey and the lessons, she added: “I’ve learnt running a business is not for the faint-hearted, you have to be objective and open to suggestions, prepared to trust others who have more experience than you, stand up for what you believe while being open to receive help if required. It can be challenging to balance.”

Considering the impact FirstAngelsJA has had on Turner Innovations, Allison was quick to urge struggling entrepreneurs to explore the possibilities of angel investment. “I always say, fifty per cent of nothing is nothing, so if you’re hung up on your business about ownership, you need to let that go,” she said. “Without financing, you cannot move forward. Angel investment is about people who have been there and done exactly what you’re doing, so they understand. You can work with them because they see you.”

For the Turners, that partnership is a crucial stepping stone to their ultimate goal of “achieving our full potential for this business, and being in a financial and experienced position to help others who choose to pursue invention have an easier path from our experiences.”