A small and soft terms loan was provided to Jennifer and Doni Kelly and their small Honiara, Solomon Islands based business called Jedom. The loan was used to purchase two new electric fruit driers and provided some needed cash flow for expansion of their small business. Jedom purchases fresh fruits such as pineapples, pawpaw and banana as well as the indigenous ngali nuts and dries them to produce a range of products including organic muesli, dried fruit and nut packets.
The business is providing an outlet for farmers from remote parts of Guadalcanal and has very good potential for growth. Indigenous people in Solomons face many challenges in starting small businesses. We thought this one was worth supporting. Consumers have been very happy with the quality products. Jedom started this product line with technical support from Kastom Gaden Association.
Notes from a meeting with Don and Jenny Jedom 20 April 2025 by Tony Jansen
Don and Jenny have built up their business, Jedom, to the point where we can give something back to the community and this is now what we are thinking about.
All the various people who have helped over the years made their business possible and they want to see how they could help others to do the same thing. TerraCircle helped them in the early days as did the individuals who supported us like Emma (Stone), Richard Beyer (KGA technical expert) and Tamara.
Their food processing has become their core activity, which has great potential to develop further, local food products — banana, taro, mangrove and ngali nut. They have carried out product research.
Feedback from people who they shared the products with, were positive about the products and want to get more.
Their curent products that they continue to produce:
- cassava and taro chips
- banana chips
- muesli
- dried pawpaw
- dried, pineapple
- dried banana.
They have a lot of data and experience from this.
They are now doing a small consultation service and have provided training for many organisations including:
- World Vision
- SIG Foreign Affairs
- KGA
- ACIAR,
- Save The Children
- UNDP and
- MAL.
on delivering training in food processing and how to make their own products. This is the main thing that has made them happy.
They are looking at making this their main focus — training etc and want it to be successful.
They would have trained more than a thousand people so far. For example, in the UNDP market for change project they trained 700 women.
They have conducted training for the Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) in 4 provinces in the Solomon Islands — 120 people Choiseul and 16-0 people iu Malaita .
Value adding of local product has high demand. They sell in to a number of outlets around town — Solomon Motors stores in particular.
A lot of people that have been trained, Jedom doesn’t have the capacity later on to continue to support them. They hear bits and pieces from them but for many people they also hear they were motivated after the training but were not able to put it into practice.
Things like access to equipment, grants for work, packaging and labelling and advice in other areas. This is what they did with the TerraCircle Micro Hrant and would like to help others to do the same.
Their ideas is to be able to follow up and maybe develop some sort of low tech drier.
Some women they have trained are excited and need:
- equipment — a kitchen as separate area to work, basic equipment, packaging
Right now they just advise them to try to develop it on their own.
They have worked with Save the Children on healthy snacks for kids around schools. They have been experimenting with a way to do chips without oil through motu baking.
They never really were able to open too much sourcing from their home communities on the weather coast, but the new road on the weather coast opens opportunities.
Growing for a project with MAL for flour from cassava — tested a certain variety — they grew 1ha of cassava but it was stolen from the field. They made flour from a simple technology and made cookies from the cassava flour and sold them at Solomon motors. and another two outlets.
