Wife Hema and older daughter Dharinee backed father Haresh Bhatt at the offices of a firm that with related U.S. and Malaysian operations reportedly had sales of $120 million in 2014. Photograph by: Malcolm Parry/Vancouver Sun

12/02/2015 (Vancouver Sun) - The palms in his native Malaysia produce 10 times the oil of other vegetable sources, 50-year-old Haresh Bhatt said in the Port Coquitlam office of Natu’oil Services Inc. and the other international firms he heads or in which he has senior positions. He ought to know. The University of Iowa computer science graduate once managed a 60,700-hectare Malaysian palm plantation, as well as being a broker, refiner, trader and packer in that industry. Making a clean break, literally, Bhatt, wife Hema and daughters Dharinee and Nikhita came to Canada in 2003 and began importing palm-based Rioilsandsoaps for sale to dollar stores.

Expansion into palm-oil-based human food products and animal feed soon followed. The latter was aided by demand for safe alternatives to feeds that had helped spread so-called mad cow disease. Serving both markets, Bhatt recruited lawyer-nephew Jignesh Bhatt to head Long Beach-based Global Agri-Trade Corporation and, in 2007, to be his and Natu’oil operation VP Hema’s partner in an overall enterprise named Bhatt Holdings Inc.

In 2008, it and Malaysian and German partners founded the Budi Feed firm southwest of Kuala Lumpur. Its now-at-capacity factory reportedly has 55 employees producing 78,000 tonnes of calcium salt cattle feed supplement for export yearly.

In 2014, the various enterprises brought in 5,000 container-loads and had sales of $120 million, Bhatt said. He projects 6,000 containers this year, with sales to top $200 million in 2017. Meanwhile, family-firm conventions apply. Nikhita is in first year at SFU’s Beedie School of Business. Final-semester health sciences student Dharinee will serve two years full-time at Natu’oil and likely become a holding company director before returning to varsity for an MBA degree. “She has very good analytical skills,” Bhatt said. She has also signed up several bakery customers, volunteered at Bhatt-supported cataract surgery camps in India, and is somewhat bemused to be a Miss World Canada contestant. “Beauty with brains. I am in awe of her,” said mother Hema, a former fashion model in Indonesia herself.