Florette Baby Leaf - Pentaflor Hortícola, Spain
Introduction
The Florette Group is part of Agrial, an Agricultural Co-Operative, which selects, prepares and sells ready-to-use salads and vegetables. Florette has 10 sites throughout Europe and employs a total of 2,600 staff, producing 1 million bags of finished product per day.
In Spain 75% of Florette’s raw material requirement is sourced from their farming subsidiary Pentaflor Hortícola. Pentaflor Hortícola farms (through contract farming agreements) around 1,333 hectares of land across Northern and Southern Spain, and in 2008, produced 26,000 tonnes of raw material. Around 75% of Pentaflor’s production goes to Florette with the remaining 25% supplied into the wholesale market. Pentaflor supplies 60% of the raw material required by Florette Spain to supply McDonald’s (Spain) requirements.
Pentaflor Hortícola has two thirds of its land in Northern Spain (in 5 areas) with the remaining one third in Southern Spain (in 3 areas). This facilitates a spread of planting and harvesting dates, producing a continuous flow of raw material for the factory, while isolating crop failure problems to one area.