Origine Group

Origine Group's founding members: (back row, l-r) Luigi Salvi, Luciano Pula, Alessandro Zani, Alessandro Cenzuales, Ilenio Bastoni, Mauro Grossi, Giovanni Casiraghi, Alberto Garbuglia, Alberto Raviolo; (front row, l-r) Gualtiero Rivoira, Mirco Zanotti, Simone Spreafico, Alessandro Pernigo and Pier Luigi Drei.

Following the recent formation of pear marketing alliance Opera, consolidation continues apace in Italy with the arrival of Origine Group, a consortium that brings together some of the biggest names in the Italian fresh produce business to sell, market and export fruit together.

The group certainly boasts some big names: Afe, Apofruit, FruttaC2, Granfrutta Zani, Kiwi Uno, Op Kiwi Sole, Pempa-Corer, Salvi-Unacoa and Spreafico together have an annual turnover of about €800m.

Origine’s primary goal will be to generate value for customers on the international market. Starting with mainly pears and kiwifruit, those nine founding members have a potential combined production of around 200,000 tonnes.

Interestingly, the move would appear more or less to rule out some of the biggest names in the Italian pear business – Apofruit, Zani, Salvi and Spreafico – teaming up with the Opera project, whose aim is to consolidate the country’s pear supply and, in doing so, make it more competitive on international markets.

For Origine Group, the plan is to develop emerging markets in places like North Africa, South America, Middle East and Asia, to introduce a more structured approach to new business development, to roll out joint marketing projects and to develop production of new, licensed varieties.

The new entity will be led by Apofruit’s Ilenio Bastoni, supported by Simone Spreafico. A management board has also been formed, consisting of Marco Salvi, Alessandro Zani, Gualtiero Rivoira, Alessandro Pernigo, Mauro Grossi, Alessandro Cenzuales and Alberto Garbuglia. The latter will manage the project assisted by CSO’s Federico Milanese.

“The priority for this aggregation is to safeguard growers’ income,” explained Bastoni. “We intend to introduce strong co-ordination immediately aimed at developing new and alternative markets. We also believe in varietal innovation, which is key to redeveloping the sector; and we are already working in this direction and will shortly announce some important news.”

Garbuglia told Italiafruit News that forming the new consortium could help on the diplomatic front to unlock markets currently off limits to Italian fruit exporters.

“Italian pears have suffered greatly in recent years but also kiwifruit needs attention because production is increasing in competitor countries – as shown by the slow start to last season’s campaign, when Greece proved to be a tricky competitor that was able to control the market price,” he suggested. “Italian kiwifruit is better, but the differences in quality are not always detected. Origin Group will try to make this happen.”

He added that having a larger volume to sell as one block would enable the members to market their fruit more effectively: “We want to create value by guaranteeing volume and quality for distributors in northern Europe and beyond. And if you have the volume, you can develop a marketing strategy. We will approach the question of a brand in a structured manner as we proceed, but already we can think about using specific brands in selected markets, for example, for kiwifruit in the Far East.”