Island Abbey Foods Ltd.
Charlottetown, Prince Edward Island, Canadawww.Honibe.com
Presenter: John Rowe, President
Island Abbey Foods Ltd. is a family owned and operated business. John Rowe has considerable experience in launching new products, with over 15 years of engineering experience in product design, development and successful market rollout including 25 innovations and 500+ licensees. The Honibe - Honey DropT is John's brainchild, and he has led its research and development since he first conceived the idea in the late 1990's. John's other business, The Timeless Group of Companies (Timeless Technologies and Timeless Medical System), has been developing software products and systems on PEI since 1994. John is responsible for overseeing the management of in-house product development as well as the many custom engineering projects that the company works on.
The key to John's success has always been the team he has surrounded himself with. The Island Abbey Foods Ltd team stands currently at 25 full time and part time staff. This team, under John's direction, is responsible for our market success to date. Some key milestones that John and his team have achieved: 70,000 individual visitors to www.Honibe.com one month after product launch in January 2008; prolonged media coverage in major national and international publications (Bon Appetit, Health Magazine, Canadian Living, Fancy Food, etc.); national distribution across Canada and the USA into major and minor grocery retail within year one of launch; and receiving multiple awards from food industry / trade associations.
Some other notable personal milestones in John's career: enabling the phenomena of Internet streaming (John worked on the team that created Apple QuickTime's audio CODEC and also MP3); achieving 150 million downloads of QuickTime in 3 years (mid 1990's; at the time the quickest proliferation of a software product in history); and creating the world's first method of ensuring a mother's breast milk is fed only to her child in a hospital nursery using bar-coding technology ('mix-ups' occur 20-25% of the time due to human error).