Lascelles Chin, the Jamaican founder and executive chairman of the Lasco Affiliated Companies, died late Saturday (May 27).

The respected business mogul and philanthropist was 86 at the time of his death.

Chin, born in December 1936 in Bog Walk, St Catherine, made a career change at 23 from a lab technician to a trader of black pepper and peas.

Some 30 years after that transition, and a fruitful managerial stint at Henkel Limited’s operations in Jamaica, Chin founded LASCO Distributors Limited in 1988.

The eponymous company quickly established itself as a household name island-wide supplying food brands and other products under its hygiene, nutrition and health lines.

In 1994, LASCO Foods Successors Limited began operations at 38 ½ Red Hills Road in St Andrew, first producing powered dairy brands ReadiMilk and Whole Milk, before the soybean-derived, market-dominating LASCO Food Drink was later introduced.

That same year, the American Soybean Association hailed the LASCO Food Drink line as the tastiest soy product in the world. The brand also won a gold medal for best-tasting product at the 1997 staging of the Havana International Fair (FIHAV) in Cuba.

LASCO Foods Successors Limited launched a full-scale export operation in 1998 to the Eastern Caribbean, then expanding to South America and Cuba. Today, LASCO’s reach is felt across the Caribbean, United States, Europe and the Middle East.

As a purveyor of quality products and services, the company’s dynamic growth since its inception led to it becoming LASCO Affiliated Companies; comprising Lasco Manufacturing, Lasco Financial Services, and Lasco Distributors.