This food service distributor finds cool returns in the white-hot Caribbean restaurant market. Terry Collier tells Steffen Smith success wasn’t always on the menu.

According to Terry Collier, a true entrepreneur is one who has tasted failure as well as success. And he should know. As an idealistic member of the early 1970s back-to-the-land movement, a long-haired Collier set out to find himself on a small farm in rural Appalachia. Along for the adventure were a college sweetheart, 20 head of sheep, five beehives, and a milk cow.

Working alongside people whose existence depended on what they were able to scratch from the land, Collier learned the meaning of hard work and discovered his grandfather’s entrepreneurial spirit. Within 10 years, there were 1,000 sheep, 250 beehives, and 200 cattle. Unfortunately, even his sweat was no match for the one-two punch of bad weather and the Arab oil embargo effects, and Collier’s dreams of making a living off the land went bust.

“With two small children depending on us, we took up my mother-in-law’s long-standing plea to help her burgeoning business,” Collier recalled. Collier’s mother-in-law was an ambitious single mother who fled her native Cuba and in 1966, armed with an SBA loan, took over a failing business on St. Thomas in the US Virgin Islands—now a $100 million-plus business.

Terry Collier

“I believe that part of being an entrepreneur is having faced the adversity of hard times and experienced failure,” said Collier. “The mantra when I was growing up was ‘capital preservation.’ But I had the example of a mother-in-law who had it all in Cuba and arrived here with nothing. The idea that you could lose it all and make it all back was very liberating for me.”

Fast forward a few years, and you’ll find Collier has put those hard-earned lessons to work. A much shorter-haired version of that farmer now sits at the helm of Merchants Export, a multi-million dollar food distribution concern that grew out of that sinking business in St. Thomas and now services most of the Caribbean’s Leeward chain.

Food products from around the world arrive at the company’s 100,000-square-foot facility at the Port of Palm Beach, where they are inspected, stored, or consolidated for export to the islands. As the port’s foreign-trade zone, the company benefits from the exemption of customs duties and excise taxes on exotic delicacies from around the world—everything from butter and cheese from New Zealand to international wines.

Restaurants galore
The company’s core business is the Caribbean’s booming private-restaurant market (the half-Dutch and half-French island of St. Maarten alone boasts some 400 restaurants and is noted as the culinary capital of the Caribbean). “Everyone wants to go down there and open a restaurant in paradise,” Collier said.

Most of the restaurants are fairly small and have little cold-storage space, due to the Caribbean’s notoriously high utility rates. As a result, chefs demand same-day order and delivery. “It’s the food service business like it was 20 years ago,” Collier said. “It’s a very different environment down there.” An example of paradise paralysis, as Collier calls it, is that chefs would often find their precious perishables being delivered in the back of a tarp-covered pickup truck in blistering heat.

To that end, Merchants Export has brought the decidedly first-world concept of just-in-time delivery to the laid back islands, encouraging restraunteurs to use online and fax ordering and maintain computerized inventories. “It’s almost a cliché, but the three things everyone wants are quality, price, and service,” Collier said. “The hardest thing in the developing world is to supply service and quality.”

In Collier’s business, providing quality products means maintaining the integrity of the “cool chain” from the manufacturer to the end user. Stateside, perishables are stored in various temperature-controlled areas of Merchant Export’s facility, ranging from ambient to minus-10 degrees. The provisions then travel on containerized ships, arriving at the company’s on-island warehousing facilities in St. Thomas, St. Croix, St. Maarten, and Anguilla. From there, the products, whether pecan-smoked speckled trout or the camel’s humps once requested by a visiting sheik, are delivered in refrigerated trucks. “All of this is expensive, so customers have to pay for it,” Collier said. “But as the islands have become more upscale, the market can handle it.”

On the price side, having its own cold storage facilities gives Merchants Export the opportunity to act on bargain buys, such as snapping up 300 cases of a hard-to-find size of snapper filets.

Smart use of technology is also an important arrow in the company’s quiver. Phone service in the Caribbean is notoriously expensive. So, to improve communication and cut costs, Merchants Export established its own virtual private networks using voice over Internet protocol and instant messaging.

Managing by threes
As the Caribbean market has blossomed, (Collier credits more disposable income, less expensive airfares, and the cruise ship boom), so has Merchants Export. The company’s growth has averaged 11% annually for the past 14 years, no mean feat in the low-margin food service industry. “I’ve always said that growth is a combination of luck and execution,” Collier said. “We were lucky to be in the Caribbean instead of, say, Detroit, but you also have to be able to deliver and execute, and that takes good people. We have very little turnover—you take care of those that take care of you, and they take care of the customer.”

Overseeing that day-to-day execution is the team of Terry Collier, president; Jeff Ullian, vice president; and Maria Collier, secretary/treasurer (the college sweetheart from those long-ago farm days). “We make a troika, so there is never a tie,” Collier laughed. “I invest in the future and make sure people have the tools they need to do their job. Jeff makes sure they do their job and make us money, and Maria keeps score.”

Merchants Export keeps pace with the torrid growth in the Caribbean with at least one major construction project a year. This year, the company plans a $1 million expansion of its St. Maarten operations. “I’m a strong believer that if you aren’t a growing organization, you are a dying organization,” Collier said. “At the same time, you have to have managed growth, or it will bury you.”

The company’s commitment to the Caribbean is also evident in its support of EPIC (Environmental Protection In the Caribbean), formed by daughter Natalia and her husband, who are both wildlife biologists. The group conducts conservation projects such as mangrove restoration to education and outreach. “It’s our way of giving something back,” Collier noted. “The Caribbean has been very good to us.”

Steffen Smith is an Atlanta-based writer and can be reached at This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it .