Dixie’s story: taking liqueurs to Guyana’s big supermarkets

Dixie Calder, from Buxton, Guyana, started making liqueurs almost by accident. In the middle of the pandemic, with cruise ship work halted and no income coming in, she began tweaking Caribbean punch de creme recipes, drawing on her training as a professional mixologist and bartender. What began as a favour for her cousin’s university project grew into a successful business – Dixie’s Punch de Cream – built on raw materials from Guyana’s rainforest, including capadulla bark, widely known in Guyana as an aphrodisiac.

Before joining the Cherie Blair Foundation’s Road to Growth, Road to Finance and Road to Leadership programmes, Dixie had no formal structure behind the business. “I just was just selling, making and selling,” she says. “There was no plan. There was no business plan.”

The programmes changed that. Road to Growth taught her the fundamentals of a business plan, Road to Finance showed her how to budget and how to invest in marketing and track return on investment, and Road to Leadership pushed her to involve her team rather than “shut out everybody else’s thoughts and ideas.”

The financial discipline paid off directly. Using what she learned about managing her margins, Dixie bought her first soft-serve ice cream machine outright, without a loan or grant, and launched a spin-off ice cream range using the same local flavours as her liqueurs.

Her retail footprint has grown just as sharply. Once sold only from home, her products are now stocked in Massy, one of Guyana’s largest supermarket chains, and many others. She has taken the brand regional as well, exhibiting at Carifesta (Caribbean Festival of Arts) and running events in Barbados, where she is now working to secure a distributor. “My business has grown tremendously,” she says.

Access to finance remains her toughest ongoing barrier. “Most of the time the banks will want you to have a male partner with you to help you with the payment.” Being taken seriously in an industry dominated by men has been a constant fight. Structured training, she argues, is what lets women walk into those conversations prepared: “You need to know to pitch your business to business people, to bank institutions, and for them to take you seriously.”

Her ambitions are regional and personal in equal measure. “For me, business success is about more than money. It means lifting myself out of poverty, creating a better future for my son, and changing perceptions about my community of Buxton. I want people to know that great, high-quality products rooted in tradition can come from here. My dream is for Dixie’s Punch de Cream to become a household name—not just in Guyana, but across the Caribbean and internationally.”