Everything remains to be done nonetheless

Seen aircraft, it looks like a table of Vasily Kandinsky. Circles biting on other circles in the middle of a very red earth, the laterite. In the Savannah around Brasilia, where Bonduelle has launched his first corn canning factory and peas, many fields are circular. Here, they are called "pins", due to the spraying ramps, running as the clockwise around a central axis. Irrigation exploded in Brazil, to enable three crops per year, without exhausting the resource water. Watering practice only from rain water collected during the four months where it falls in abundance. What do turn the plant twelve months of the year, against four months of the year in Europe. "No stocks to finance needs in virtually non-existent working capital and costs incomparably low", welcomes you in Bonduelle. In total, the Group believes that the return on investment will be 3 times faster in the Brazil than across the Atlantic.

This convinced Benoît Bonduelle, who surveyed the world looking for new markets for the group headed by his brother Christophe, create a site at this location, a 100 km southwest of the capital. To launch the conquest of South America.

The Brazil has many features of an eldorado for the specialist of the vegetable, which has suffered all the vagaries of the weather in 2009. Everything seems easier here. The ultra-modern factory of Cristalina, 100 kilometres from Brazilia, was built in record time, eight months, with an investment of EUR 15 million. It is 2 times less than in Russia for the Krasnodar plant, which has the same capacity. "Here, it is a motorway to investors, said Benoît Bonduelle.". There is not the problems of corruption of the countries of the East. "Not resistance to change. Enthusiasm, many in a country where the ears of corn are 2 metres high, 2 times larger than that which is recorded on the Continent. And the minimum wage is 510 reals a month or 216 euros.

"The beginning of an adventure."

Everything remains to be done nonetheless. Present since 1995 to the Brazil, Bonduelle is there still controls that 0.5 of the sales of vegetables. So far, there was only a very wealthy clientele with a frozen and imported canned sold 5 times more expensive than the products of the competition. By producing locally, group of Villeneuve - Ascq will considerably reduce its prices and offer products of superior quality to only 20 more than the other manufacturers. Tropical varieties of corn and peas specifically developed for the Brazilian market. The first products were very well received by the consumer, who was until then that peas dehydrated or corn in the juice, where it loses its nutritional qualities. The difference in taste and texture of the peas "supersweet", a range patented by Bonduelle, and vacuum products is indisputable. The train where the middle classes grow, the French industrial finds "win 10 million consumers more per year", which should allow him to control 10 of the market of the vegetable transformed within five years.

Rather than be limited to the first five distributors, which concentrate 50 of sales, Bonduelle goes, with the factory of Cristalina, able to deliver all of the distribution, including the small business. A frozen food production unit will follow in 2015, then the export activity should start in 2018 to the border countries of Mercosur. "Did we until the beginning of the adventure", recognizes Benoît Bonduelle. The potential exists, if one compares the 2.7 kg for canned vegetables that consume the Brazilians each year to the 50 kilos of French households.

But others before him have failed. This is the case of Unilever, who was leader of the market and which resold in 2005 activities to the Brasfrigo group, now in great difficulty.