French company takes a hands-on approach in Peru
“Our staff in Peru will be able to organize traceability, manage grower relationships, monitor quality and all of the other things we need to do,” said Alterbio's Madjid Aidh. “We have an agricultural specialist who will monitor things from a technical side, and then we have staff that's more about payments and finances.” Together, the team will ensure that the fruit shipped from Peru is grown in compliance with all E.U. and company regulations.
“The point of getting staff over there is to check everything farm by farm to see if they're acting how we expect them to act,” said Madjid. “There was recently a producer in Peru that lost its fair trade certification, and that's the thing we want to avoid with this. We want to make sure that our products are free of the chemicals that are prohibited and we want to make sure that our fruit is grown in a fair trade manner.”
In this, the arrangement's inaugural year, the main products sourced from Peru will be mangos, ginger and avocados. But Madjid plans to undertake trial shipments of more products, especially exotics, in the coming years.
“Historically, we have sourced our products mainly from France, Spain and Northern Africa, but we're big enough that we can now directly source fruit from more places,” said Madjid. “This partnership gives us more control over that process.”
For more information, please visit: www.alterbio.com