AFTER OPERATIONS IN COSTA RICA, GOALS FOR GROWTH BECAME GLOBAL.

1971 posed great challenges for GRUMA. Undoubtedly, one of the most remarkable was that of internationalization; in those days the Group had already developed an important industry through the transformation of corn into flour. Likewise, it had an important technological and administrative knowledge that allowed for the idea of new horizons, beyond Mexican frontiers.

Upon express invitation from the government of Costa Rica, particularly from president José María Figueres, GRUMA researched the market of that nation where, mainly for economic reasons, corn was not longer being produced. Instead, wheat was imported as international help provided by the United States in those days.

With a long-term vision, the administration of president Figueres devoted to the task of finding the suitable person, wherever such was found, that could be able to return the culture of corn to his nation. Otherwise, if things continued in such way, in a decade or so the population would have get used to the consumption of just wheat, and relying only on the imports of this grain.

In that way, the concern of the Costa Rican leader was aimed at finding an institution or company able to develop an industry of corn in his nation, with a friendlier weather for this grain than for wheat.

The search was over in Mexico, when the president of that time, Luis Echeverría Alvarez suggested to the Costa Rican head of state to analyze the case of the flour industry in his country where GRUMA, a company being founded by Don Roberto González Barrera, played an essential role.

 GRUMA had the required profile; in 1973, the company was given the task of repeating its industrial experience in that new market and this opened the way for one of the most important steps in its 50 years of history. A stage that would allow the company to acquire experience abroad began, taking advantage of its own technology.

The following ones were anuses of arduous work, looking for to penetrate firmly in the market with a new product; lapse that was also good to check the effectiveness of the new technologies that they left developing and to check the effectiveness of distribution programs, as well as the opportunity to diversify the managerial activities of GRUMA.

HEART PALM TREE OPERATION 

Regarding the incursion of GRUMA in the processing and packaging of heart palm tree, Don Roberto González Barrera himself recalls: “When our tortilla operations as regards to advertising, massive distribution, production and management had firm foundations, then we had the opportunity to buy a company of juices and canned preserves with branches in Costa Rica and Guatemala. Together with that business, a small property that cultivated palm tree in a rudimentary manner was included”. 

“I remember that my staff told me at that time ‘let’s close the heart palm tree thing and keep canned preserves…’ But I said no, it is exactly the opposite: close the preserves but leave the heart palm tree production. Since I like researching and I also saw the interest of the Principal of the University of Costa Rica, who offered researching support, I decided to grow heart palm tree”.

In those days there was no background of controlled sowing, and the entrepreneurs dedicated to this vegetable exploited the natural production of countries like Brazil (the main competitor at that time) Paraguay, Uruguay and Colombia, which supplied the French market and some countries of the current European Union. 

“In that way, we began sowing this palm artificially scientifically, which is grown in tropical countries only. At that time Brazil was the king of export, but with natural plantations, even so, I liked the product a lot”.  

For Don Roberto the heart palm tree did not mean business, “I wanted to do it for Costa Rica; I said to myself: we will make something useful for Costa Rica”. Therefore, with the support of researchers from the University of Costa Rica, an artificially controlled cultivation was conducted in the beginning.

GRUMA, apart from having carried out the research of the palm tree as agriculture, it was responsible of creating an industrial process for it. “Manuel Rubio believed in the technology for the heart palm tree and now we produce everything automatically, we were the detonator of the industrialization and globalization of this product”, Don Roberto recalls. “Nowadays it is a real business due to the fact that we concerned about the whole research and development of the machinery since the beginning”.

In Costa Rica, 15,000 hectares of palm tree are being cropped span and a countless number of producers. GRUMA owns two thousand hectares and a market in the European Union, France, Belgium, Italy and Spain, among others.  “Heart Palm tree was to serve the community where you live; today, it is a non-traditional export product that employs directly almost 10 thousand people in that country”, Don Roberto González Barrera would explain.

45% from the sales of this product correspond to Europe, 45% to Canada and the United States and the remaining 10% to Latin American countries and Japan.