Nº12 / Sep’13 · 9
Yet another year, as for the last 27, Agroponiente is getting ready to begin a new fruit and vegetable season. Day after day the men and women who work in this company, the same as the growers, will be facing a new year full of hard work and effort, uncertainty, pressure and fierce competition both from within and outside Spain, but also satisfaction, or at least we hope so. Anyone who knows how Agroponiente works from the inside will find it easy to compare us to a great family, in which no individual member can face any of the tasks on their own, but as part of a team, a machine that must be well oiled and work perfectly. Within Agroponiente’s corporate philosophy there are certain concepts which are written in capital letters. Concepts such as the search for excellence in both produce and processes, without which it would have been impossible to maintain the level of satisfaction we have been offering Europe’s major, and most prestigious, trading companies and businesses for over two and a half decades now. Not to forget others such as innovation, modernization, seriousness, responsibility and especially; grower service support. Every year, as with each of the 27 seasons we have begun together, we have developed plans
to improve on all those as well as other aspects. This year will be no exception. However, this year’s annual strategic plan will centred around the growers, reinforcing the ties with them, strengthening the bridges which enable us to serve them more efficiently, listen to them more carefully and something we consider imperative; to let them know how important they are to us, making then feel comfortable, happy and loved in the company. In theory, that is nothing new, we’ve been doing it ever since Agroponiente came into being. However, this year we have decided to centre our efforts on developing ideas and projects to reinforce it in the most practical way. On one hand we would like to reinforce the attention to growers’ requirements by increasing the number of channels of communication between us and to make the time spent working together as pleasant as possible. We are going to dedicate all our efforts to that and the results will become apparent throughout the whole year, for example in our Field Department, which has been working for decades with agricultural engineers and people who know greenhouses better than anyone else, we are going to set up the Grower Attention
Service for them to find an open channel for their queries and requirements, always. We are also going to implement measures to strengthen the relationship, both at work and outside, with merging moments to get together and talk, grower training programmes to contribute to professional and personal improvement. We are doing this because Agroponiente is their home and we are all one family. We want to strengthen links with the growers, because we are two inseparable parts of the production and marketing process. At Agroponiente, for the last 27 years, we have understood that the only way to produce and sell a product properly, at good prices and continuously is through quality, earning the trust of Europe’s most powerful buyers, understanding and meeting their needs and knowing exactly what the markets want. All this can only be done through teamwork. This characteristic has been Agroponiente’s hallmark for more than a quarter of a century, now to be reinforced with new measures. This is to be the growers’ season, the Year of the Grower. Antonio Escobar Rubio CEO Grupo Agroponiente