"Chile managed large volumes this year and had better sugar content in their grapes, which made them a strong competitor for our Indian grapes,” says Andreas Schindler from Don Limón.
Limes and Sustainability
Don Limón’s main product is limes, with which they mostly focus on the US market. “Our limes arrive in Texas by truck from Mexico and in Miami, Florida, by boat, from Guatemala, and they are then distributed throughout the US and Canada. Our organic limes do especially well in Canada,”
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Andreas continues. “The European market is much more difficult for limes, because there’s too much volume coming to the markets. We send about ten lorries to the US per week, and only about two or three containers per week to Europe.”
“Veracruz is our main lime supplier for Europe, and they have a very well-informed structure. Together with the German Government, we train producers to apply the Good Agricultural Practices as well as all our employees in the packing house to apply the Good Manufacturing Practices in order to reach the best quality of limes in the market."
"We engage and support small scale farmers by giving them technical and material support to have a healthy and well-nourished plant, since it is the main factor to achieve a high quality fruit; which at the end means better returns for the producer,” Andreas explains. “When we started ten years ago, everything had to be re-sorted in the US, because quality was that bad. But we’ve now achieved an improvement of delivered quality by improving raw material quality.”
“We use SDGs, Sustainable Development Goals and work on empowering women and producing healthy food. The fact that women can work in our packing stations is already a big step forward, but we still have far to go,” Andreas concludes.
Sweet potatoes
Don Limón also has a year-round fresh sweet potato season. “We produce our sweet potatoes in Guatemala, Honduras and Nicaragua, while most sweet potatoes are produced in the Northern Hemisphere. Our sweet potatoes can be in the shops 140 days after planting, while most companies supply the product from storage, sometimes even after 1 year of being stored."
"We supply sweet potatoes with a good shelf life and zero residues of chemicals as the results of applying Good Agricultural Practices during the production process and the usage of Biological pest control during the 50% of the crop's cycle. The purple fleshed and white fleshed varieties are becoming more popular, but the orange one is still our biggest seller.”
Andreas continues: “Sweet potatoes are a very noble crop as it can be use for different purposes such as nutrition programs to feed poor people in the countries on the way of development, also for industrial use or even they can be processed into pet food, chips and crisps. We market them as a fresh and a processed product, and we also market them locally in order to promote eating healthy in our Central American countries, we try to have some impact on basic improvement of living conditions.”
For more information, please contact:
Andreas Schindler
Don Limon
Tel: +49 (0)40 3095499 45
Mob: +49 (0)171 85 83 211
www.don-limon.de
www.pilz-schindler.de