Jakana founder Alexandra Chong builds Jamaican botanical brand from diaspora base

Jamaican-born entrepreneur Alexandra Chong, founder and chief executive officer of wellness company Jakana, is working from England to grow medicinal plants, manufacture natural products on an organic farm, and build what she describes as the next major Jamaican brand for overseas markets.

Chong was raised in Oracabessa and attended Columbus Prep School in St. Ann's Bay before leaving for boarding school in England. She later trained at tennis academies in the United States, England and New York, and represented Jamaica in tennis — an experience she said filled her with pride as she travelled with Jamaican athletes.

A university tennis scholarship took her to Florida International University in Miami. In her late teens she decided her future lay elsewhere, and she went on to study law at the London School of Economics. She had considered politics after representing Jamaica as an athlete and saw law as a common path into public life, hoping to return home soon after qualifying. Her father urged her to gain experience abroad first — advice she followed before founding a company called Lulu in the United States and later becoming an entrepreneur focused on Jamaica.

Chong said she never lost her Jamaican identity. Her parents remained on the island, and she visited family and friends three or four times a year. What she missed most, she said, was Jamaica's natural setting — "barefoot luxury" such as walking in a garden and picking mango from a tree — and the island's healing character. That longing, combined with entrepreneurship experience gained abroad and a wish to raise her children in Jamaica, shaped Jakana.

She lived in Jamaica for eight years within the past decade and only recently moved back to England. Through Jakana she aims to create jobs and meaningful work on the island. The company specialises in medicinal plants, ranging from medical ganja to lemongrass and cerasee, and grows about 80 botanical varieties at its farm, where products are also manufactured. Among bestsellers is a lemongrass relief balm she compared to an all-natural version of Tiger Balm. The farm is organic, and Chong stressed that the brand is grown, made and built from Jamaica.

She credited her father, Harry Chong of Oracabessa, as a lifelong inspiration — recalling, among other things, his use of aloe on her sunburns — and said she returns to Jamaica at least every six weeks.