“We will try to enter the niche of the small producers which will be able to keep small stores going. We will put traditional product islands in the sea of industrial products. We will build a chain of small stores, where the amounts that fit the standard of the traditional certified product, traditionally made and preserved can be easily found,” Izvoranu said at the ZF Agribusiness 2019 conference.
Andrei Pascu, of Rodagria, a cooperative that farms blackberries, blueberries, strawberries and cherries, as well as small amounts of vegetables and grain, says he sells his products through all the major stores in Bucharest and in several grocery stores.
“We have five operational strategies: communication with supermarkets every week, as well as with the end user once a year; partnership – there’s five of us in the soft fruit and cherry area; education – we invest time, energy and money to educate engineers; technology – we use a computerized fertilizing system and minimize losses.”
The Romanian food industry stands at 55 billion to 60 billion lei a year, but the focus of retail chains on Romanian-made brands could lead to fast-paced growth of the market.
Agriculture may become the main growth driver of the Romanian economy, but to get there, farmers need to team up in cooperatives or partnerships between them or with retailers and turn the raw material into a finished product, because processing is yet another significant growth factor, the representatives of the business sector and of the government said at the ZF Agribusiness 2019 conference.
“We need a strategy for the agribusiness sector to become important. Romania must not only look to the region and locally to the EU, but also globally. The strategy should include a component of cooperation between the government, the business sector and main actors. The major actors may be catalysts for creation of cooperatives of small farmers, which would ensure scalability, bargaining power, the possibility to create powerful brands, easier access to technology and the possibility to think globally,” said Zeno Caprariu, audit and assurance partner with Deloitte Romania.
(English version by Loredana Fratila-Cristescu)