New machines allow Portuguese blueberry producer to open second revenue stream

In just five years since its start-up, Logofruits has become the largest blueberry producer in Portu…

In just five years since its start-up, Logofruits has become the largest blueberry producer in Portugal and one of the largest in Europe. As well as growing and packing fruit for well-known supermarket chains in northern Europe and Spain, Logofruits also provides packing services for wholesalers from South America and South Africa. And the business is still growing: for its sixth season, in 2024, production at its packhouse near Alcácer will step up from one shift per day to two.

The business' founder and managing partner is Lourenço De Botton. Although he started cautiously, with a modest 15-hectare site, he thinks big. After researching the blueberry industry's challenges and opportunities and visiting other blueberry packhouses to see how they do things, he arrived at two important decisions.

One of those decisions was to invest in packhouse line equipment from Tomra Food so that packing fruit for export could be brought in-house. Before the 2023 season, state-of-the-art line solutions were installed at the Alcácer plant in November 2022: Tomra's KATO260 precision grading system with LUCAi™ artificial intelligence and two Tomra Curo filling systems.

The second decision made possible by the first one: adding a new revenue stream by using the Tomra line equipment to sort and pack blueberries from South American companies (from Chile and Peru) and South African ones who wanted to sell in Europe.

Logofruits' Alcácer location in the Setūbal municipality, 95 kilometers south of Lisbon, is close to major highways and export ports of Setubal and Sines.It increased from 15-hectares to 90 with a second, 70-hectare site acquired closer to Lisbon.

De Botton explains: “We expect demand to keep increasing over the next couple of years, but we also expect that it will get harder for small producers. More and more, this is going to be an industrial-scale segment, with cost control becoming even more important than it already is. This means technology is one of the most important factors for our company – not only in the field but also in our packaging facilities. We extensively evaluated the market and the various technical solutions available before investing in equipment. This research showed that the fit between Logofruits and Tomra was like hand in glove.”

When De Botton is asked how useful Tomra's line solutions have subsequently proven, he replies without hesitation: “They're game-changers.”

Unlocking access to new markets
Logofruits' Packing House Manager at the Alcácer plant, Miguel Silva, remembers: “Before we acquired these machines, we were dispatching nearly all our fruit to our partners in Holland to be packed for the different European markets, while in Portugal, we packed products manually for the domestic market.”