Morning Glory Rice Cereal sees grand launch at Essequibo Night

Nov 02, 2017 News

---

• Hits local stores in two weeks
  

  The morning glory booth

  The annual Essequibo Night event is one which has always attracted large crowds and motivated the showcasing of the best that the Cinderella County has to offer. This year, without a doubt, the highlight of the event was the entrance into the consumer marketplace by the home-grown Morning Glory Rice Cereal.
  Despite the fact that perhaps, more exposure to a wider cross section of the country was available at the coincident Agro-Processors “Uncapped” Expo, the Institute of Applied Science and Technology (IAST), which currently owns and operates the Morning Glory factory, deliberately choose this home event for the consumer launch of the product.
  Essequibians responded with resounding enthusiasm and characteristic pride. The Morning Glory booth provided an explosion of color, quality, innovative design and local pride that will surely be talked about for months and will provide the new, significantly raised bar for the well-attended event.
  It didn’t hurt that the clever marketers at the IAST chose to brand their product with the well-known Persaud triplet sisters. In a witty play on the Cinderella County, the branders sought to have this invoked through the costuming of one of the triplet sisters as Cinderella.
  The triplets, who were born and grew up on the Essequibo Coast, were actually present at the event, in costume, posing in front of a giant box of the cereal. Essequibians of all races, age and gender lined up to have their photographs taken with the sisters.
  A giant, illuminated billboard above the Morning Glory booth was seen from anywhere on the Anna Regina Community Ground. With the charming Persaud sisters smiling graciously, their invitation to the triple benefits of the product: “High in Energy, High in Fibre, and Made with the Goodness of Essequibo Rice,” made patrons form a beeline to the Morning Glory booth.
  Rayann Hinckson, Confidential Secretary of IAST, explained that the booth design was the handy work of IAST Project Manager, Raveena Mangal.
  The IAST booth provided an opportunity to Essequibians to taste the product in comfort, served by staff members clad in all white and decked out in gloves and hairnets.
  This approach further led to the general impression of high quality and hygiene conveyed by the booth design and the actual product, which is exquisitely packaged.
  Furthermore, patrons of the booth were also able to purchase boxes of cereal, on sale for the first time in the country, for a special introductory Essequibo Night price of $500.
  Nonieka Daniels, Chief Accountant of the IAST, said that they were overwhelmed by the volume of sales of the product. He explained that there were repeated requests for the product to appear on the shelves of the local supermarkets and stores.
  IAST’s Deputy Director, Deonarine Jagdeo, explained that the product will indeed hit supermarket shelves in the first and second weeks of November, all across the country, as the IAST has reached an agreement with a major distributor to distribute the product countrywide.
  This product has taken the Essequibo Coast by storm and already, the brand has captured the hearts and palates of the population there.
  PRODUCT CREATION
  The process for the creation of Morning Glory Cereal utilizes 99% raw materials produced in Guyana. The list of ingredients includes broken rice, rice bran, sugar and molasses. Only salt, baking soda and a fortifying vitamin cocktail is imported.
  The broken rice is further milled into rice flour in a process which is relatively quiet and creates no dust pollution, and this is then mixed with fresh sifted rice bran, sugar, baking soda and salt in a high speed mixer. From this point onwards, the entire process is automated until the cereal is packaged.
  Workers in the plant, who are needed only to process the raw materials and introduce it to the process and to monitor the quality of the cereal as it is produced as well as ensure that the plant environment is kept scrupulously clean, follow a strict regimen of hygienic controls.
  The processing area can be viewed by visitors and office staff through view windows constructed specifically for this purpose.
  Professor Suresh Narine who heads IAST explained that the design flow of the facility was motivated in part by the design of several food plants he worked in for M&M Mars in the United States and internationally, in research and development.
  He was also loud in praise for Mr. Sewpersaud Manohar, the Head of the Food and Feed Department at the IAST, who he credits as the inventor of the Cereal and who had extensive input into the design of the final plant.
  The process generates no waste – any cereal which is rejected due to quality deviations or over supply, is fed to local pigs through relationships established by the facility with local livestock farmers.
  The facility has a strict quality control system: cereals are assessed on the basis of shape integrity, coating integrity, colour, degree of caramelization, amount of product dust, integrity of packaging, etc.
  The facility itself is kept in an ultra-clean state, with the plant being thoroughly cleaned after every production shift, and complete line preventative maintenance being performed weekly.
  The plant has the capacity to produce 200 kg of cereal in an hour, so that if three shifts are employed, it is possible to produce 1, 000 metric tonnes of cereal in a calendar year.
  Professor Narine said that one would never want to run the facility that hard. Due to the amount of rice in the cereal, this is very nearly a demand of 800 metric tonnes of rice in a year, when the plant is operated at maximum capacity.

---

---