Watch the video interview with Luigi La Montagna:
"Fruit and vegetable sales should pick up. For us, the trend has been positive for the past two years. The fresh-cut segment is livening up and fresh juices are becoming more popular."
"Fruit and vegetable sales should pick up. For us, the trend has been positive for the past two years. The fresh-cut segment is livening up and fresh juices are becoming more popular."
"I visited many Italian and foreign companies. Our entrepreneurs are very good, but they tend to work too much on their own. Even if they have excellent produce, costs are high and therefore they find it difficult to compete with Egypt, Morocco, Senegal and Turkey. We will definitely not be able to counter imports if we continue working this way."
Luigi La Montagna
As regards the relationship with suppliers, La Montagna is very honest. "We ask for respect for what we decide to do together. From both sides. We sell produce that is fresh, so we need to work together every day. When there is a problem, like it happened this month, we need to keep talking. We managed to maintain our turnover thanks to my network. Because of the bad weather, Italian production has partly disappeared. We integrated with produce from abroad, but we have also paid producers more - we bought courgettes at €4 and sold them at €4.29. Nobody made money, but at least they were available for our customers."
"In 2014, we decided to keep focusing on our identity as a discounter. We are pretty much an evolved supermarket for what concerns fresh produce, as our sections are bigger than those in other supermarkets and we have also introduced checks in every platform to guarantee high quality. We decided to put fruit and vegetables first. Every flyer has 12 products on special offer, and we do that by lowering our margins, not by compromising on quality. We focus on volumes. Customers see we have excellent-quality produce and they come back."