Besana of Naples, Italy's leading exporter of dried fruit, has set up a cold-chain facility for organic dates at Tozeur in Tunisia on the site of an oasis fed by underground water supplies located at a depth of 763 metres. The dates are placed into insect-proof storage immediately before being loaded into refrigerated trucks for transportation to Tunis. They are then shipped to Leghorn and Salerno to reach mainland European supermarkets within 72 hours. Founded in 1921, Besana has an annual output of 10,000 tonnes of dried fruit comprising dates, figs and apricots as well as haze nuts, peanuts and almonds and annual sales of euro46 million, 75 per cent of which comes from exports.
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