Until four months ago, Blai Agulló was an engineer at Ford Valencia, where he led a team of 30 people. This task was combined with the recovery of the olive terraces that his father had left them in Cocentaina, north of Alicante. He has now left his job to focus on 9 Oliveres, the brand of millenary olive oils inherited from his family. “Here there is no stress, there are no resignations. Now I come from pruning and I feel freer… better,” says he, who did not dare to professionalize himself as an entrepreneur until he saw that the business was solid.
His father had died suddenly in 2015 and it was then that his children -Blai and Joan Agulló- saw “overnight that we had to run the family lands, in a very traditional way that was not profitable. We saw each other forced to abandon them,” he explains. But before throwing in the towel, they undertook some changes: they transformed the crops into organic, computerized the fertilization of the fields and periodically analyzed the state of the trees. They were accompanied on the trip by Joan Francés, a marketing specialist.
“Everything allowed us to improve in marketing because we saw that this way we could sell in other markets with an oil that is of high quality,” summarizes Agulló. On this journey of transformation, the pandemic came across, which was not the excuse, but the boost that the business needed to grow.
Because just as before the olives only went from the fields to the cooperative, where their father took them, the industrialization of the process has allowed them to create their own brand that they sell in their own e-commerce, thus saving the cost of intermediaries. Its oils are all over Spain, also in France, Germany and soon in Taiwan.
During this time, they have continued to work on the nine thousand-year-old olive trees and the 700 centenary olive trees on their farm, in addition to having recovered more than 60,000 square meters of abandoned land next door, on which they have planted 1,500 new olive trees of native varieties. There they have replanted the sanglot real and alfafarenca varieties, both autochthonous that grow again in the rural environment of the mountains of Alicante.
They boast of having the certification of “ecological product” granted by the Organic Agriculture Committee of the Valencian Community, in addition to having the “Parcs Naturals” brand for carrying out sustainable agriculture in the surroundings of the Serra de Mariola Natural Park.
On this newly acquired land, they have launched a campaign to adopt olive trees, following the model of other citrus companies. “We propose that they participate in the project, they can visit their olive tree and then we make them a route so that they can see the olive tree whenever they want,” explains Agulló.
This past month they decided to enter the StartUPV program, from the Polytechnic University of Valencia, which offers them free coworking, training, advice and promotion together with 14 other new startups that have joined its entrepreneurial ecosystem. In exchange, they participate in training talks for other young people from the Comtat and L’Alcoià regions.
“We knew we were a startup but we didn’t know anything about the startup world,” acknowledges Blai Agulló, for whom entrepreneurship only made sense if the process was automated and industrialized. In the end, the decade spent at Ford Almussafes has weighed heavily on those who now enjoy the countryside and the ancient olive trees. You never know.
