Spain: Primaflor becomes a GLOBALG.A.P. member
To ensure its product quality and year-round availability, Primaflor maintains more than 4,000 hectares of crops throughout the year at different altitudes and locations, ranging from the coasts to the mountains (1,000m above sea level). Primaflor’s personnel encompasses up to 1,500 employees, including seasonal contract workers in countries of like Ecuador, Colombia and Peru, for whom it provides living accommodations and services. The company distributes its products in most European countries, and continually optimizes its offerings to respond to the demands of this very heterogeneous market.
Primaflor says it meets the needs of its customers by maintaining strong, ongoing relationships and focusing on sustainability in all aspects of its business. It continually adapts to fulfill its customers’ dynamic requirements for production procedures and supply chain requirements, saying that these facets of its business are just as important as its product offering and price levels.
With energy, fertilizer and labor costs steadily increasing under present market conditions, Primaflor maintains its competitive edge by consistently honing its efficiency. For example, in its production of iceberg lettuce, a commodity product with high price volatility, Primaflor leverages its innovation experience to offer the market better produce quality, grown conventionally, at lower costs. Primaflor also continues to develop and market new products and refine all aspects of its business to maintain its value proposition.
For Primaflor, GLOBALG.A.P. Certification and membership serve as integral and enabling assets in this ongoing process. The company has improved its growing practices, internally consolidated and externally facilitated its sustainability efforts, increased market confidence in its products, and reinforced its supply chain performance. It has added to its competitive value in particular among its more quality vs. price-focused customers, who appreciate the food safety and environmental sustainability benefits inherent in GLOBALG.A.P. Certification. As Primaflor reports:
“In such a competitive market, the differentiation in quality and production procedures is essential to consolidate our business. Initiatives like GLOBALG.A.P. encourage us to continuously improve across all standards, a challenging aspiration and not always easy to achieve, but important to our relationship with key customers, which means we can operate in a market that is not just about price.”
The company also has benefitted from its GLOBALG.A.P. membership in having a direct voice in food safety standards development in these challenging market conditions:
“Through our participation as members of GLOBALG.A.P., we want to give our practical point of view for the development of the norms, focusing the attention on all the essential aspects which guaranty sustainability, not only in terms of economic performance, but also environmental performance and ethical practice. It is important that we fully understand that sustainability can only be achieved by achieving success across all three areas.”
Primaflor is enthusiastic about its cooperation with GLOBALG.A.P. and its involvement in future initiatives:
“We would like GLOBALG.A.P. to become more global in the near future, integrating a higher number of customers in such a way that we could unify and simplify our quality strategies. We would like most of our customers to be able to value the efforts we invest in to integrate good agricultural practices in our growing activity, and give stability to the supply chain and the complete agro food sector in general.”
For more information please visit www.primaflor.com