One day in August 2019, Oriol Aldomà, a primary school teacher, was visiting his friend Marc Ibós, who worked in a family business selling fruit in Bellpuig, a town of barely 5,000 inhabitants, in the province of Lleida. He noticed that some of the gender was rejected by a client for their appearance. “I can take that bucket of apples, because actually, they're good, right?” he asked his friend. “Of course, yes, totally, we're going to throw them away,” he responded, not knowing that there was a project brewing that both of them would embark on. The Talkual company began selling just six months later and has broken, with numbers in hand (they double turnover every year), the tyranny of food aesthetics: the consumer knows how to appreciate the “inner beauty” of ugly fruit.
Oriol was returning from an inspiring trip through Asia and they both landed on the idea. It had to be a project with a positive impact on the world, they wanted to contribute their grain of sand, their little box of fruit, in this case, for a less absurd market. A child dies of hunger every 15 seconds but, according to the FAO, every year we throw away 570 million tons of good food.
The product had to be local, the transport sustainable, the packaging free of plastics and recyclable, and the price fair to the farmers. As it is. They only invested 6,000 euros (3,000 to create the limited company) because they already had the facilities of the Ibós family and the knowledge of the sector. “It is very easy for me to talk to producers because, as a producer, I have experienced the same thing. Suddenly you have a surplus and you don't know where to put it,” says the entrepreneur from Ilerda. They investigated, of course, where something similar was being done and they only found a couple of firms in the US. In Spain, no one.
“The most difficult thing at the beginning was changing the mentality of the traditional farmer who did not understand the business and did not want or did not know how to participate. Sometimes they sent us some of the rotten stuff,” Ibós recalls. TalKual buys fruit and vegetables from all over Spain (they prefer to deal with small farmers), carries out quality control in its warehouse in Bellpuig, packages the product and sends it throughout the country to its customers. 90% are individuals and the other 10% are companies, such as Alsa or Decathlon, which allocate them to their employees. Each box contains a variety of seasonal products and you can choose from several sizes; a 7 kilo box, for example, costs about 20 euros.
Despite being a business entirely on-line, during the first two years they did not even worry about marketing, “we were growing at a good pace organically,” highlights the co-founder of TalKual. “Actually, the media promoted us. They noticed us from the beginning. From the town radio we jumped to another one in the province, then to another state one. We have already appeared in 80 or 90 publications.” This new breed called influencers, of course, is also a touchstone in this business history, although in this case, the celebrities arrived alone. “We grew a lot with that. Famous people came and talked about us on their networks. We will always remember the actress Anna Castillo, her post was a true turning point,” thanks the co-founder of the firm.
Ambassadors
Now they do have ambassadors for their brand, they pay for some ads on Instagram (91,000 followers) and they create their stories and reels. They make profits that they reinvest every year. The first year, in 2020, they invoiced 350,000 euros. The following year, 800,000. In 2022, 1.3 million and they will close this 2023 with close to three million euros (the projection for 2024 is to double sales again). They started with just the two of them and now they have 21 employees, including five people at risk of social exclusion.
After being finalists in the CaixaBank Entrepreneurs XXI awards this year and obtaining 12,000 euros from the European “digital kit”, they set new goals: “It is in our path to create a market place (a virtual market), in the medium term. We want to sell oil, jam, eggs, products that are good for the environment, we will start with nuts. The idea is to continue growing towards other countries as well. Maybe next year,” says the young Catalan businessman.
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