As a child, my moth­er drove me to pri­ma­ry school in St. Joseph in the morn­ings. We would of­ten pass the Nestlé fac­to­ry by the Churchill-Roo­sevelt High­way, and I would ask if the gi­ant stor­age tanks with the Mi­lo and Quik ad­ver­tise­ments on them were ac­tu­al­ly full of my favourite choco­late milk drinks. My child­like mind filled the in­side of the Nes­tle fac­to­ry with im­ages from the Willy Won­ka movie with seas of choco­late and rivers of milk and can­dy in every scene.

Since then, in my mind the Nestlé fac­to­ry on the high­way dis­ap­peared in­to the land­scape not un­like the green moun­tains of the North­ern Range. It has now come back in­to fo­cus as talk of Nestlé re­view­ing its op­er­a­tions for a pos­si­ble pull­out has made news.

As an adult, I see the same fac­to­ry as a na­tion­al as­set and un­der­stand that the Com­pa­nies Act will pro­tect share­hold­ers’ in­ter­ests; there­fore, it will be in the best in­ter­est of T&T cit­i­zens for a wide cross-sec­tion of the pub­lic to in­vest their ex­cess cash in­to own­ing Nestlé’s op­er­a­tions.