The Caribbean has been building world-class businesses for decades. Nobody covered it properly. Until now.
The Foundpreneur Podcast is a weekly conversation series hosted by Caribbean journalist and media founder Stephen Stanberry. Every episode goes deep with founders from across the Caribbean and its diaspora, Jamaica, Dominican Republic, Trinidad, Barbados, Cayman Islands, and beyond unpacking the real story behind the build.
No hype. No overnight success myths. Just honest conversations about what it actually takes to build a business in this region the strategies, the setbacks, and the wins that never made the mainstream business press.
New episodes every week. Subscribe wherever you listen to podcasts.
Melissa Pascal has lost money, rebuilt businesses, changed business models and started again more than once.
At 25, she lost more than US$100,000 running a café in Port of Spain.
Years later, she returned to her family’s 40-year-old bakery and helped shift it from a retail-focused operation toward B2B and private-label manufacturing. The business eventually reached roughly US$1 million in annual sales.
Then another opportunity appeared.
During a foreign exchange shortage in Trinidad and Tobago, imported rice cakes disappeared from shelves.
Melissa heard someone complain about the shortage at the gym.
She remembered a machine she had seen years earlier at a trade show.
And she bought it.
That decision became Sultan Manufacturing.
In this conversation, Melissa talks about what it means to spot a real market gap, invest before everyone agrees with you, build manufacturing systems, work inside a family business and keep going after major failures.
She also explains why she believes imported products often prove local demand, why Caribbean founders need to think more seriously about manufacturing, and how she now uses AI to solve operational problems inside her own businesses.
We also get into the harder side of entrepreneurship.
Melissa talks openly about losing confidence, crying in her van while running the family business, rebuilding her identity and learning that failure hurts less once you have survived it before. This episode is about more than rice cakes.
It is about learning how to see a problem differently.
For Melissa, empty shelves were not only a shortage.
They were market research.
Find Melissa:
Blueprint Caribbean: blueprintcaribbean.com
LinkedIn and Instagram: Melissa Pascal
