A sleepless night led Elena Gisbert, 32, to look through job offers pages. One of them especially caught his attention: “Grefusa product taster. Minimum experience: not required. Salary of €1,000 for a day of work: includes trying the best and new Grefusa products. If your dream job is to try the best Grefusa products, having a great experience and getting paid for it, great pleasure granted.” As a good consumer of snacks and nuts, she couldn’t pass it up. By then there were already more than 38,000 candidates, which when the registration period ended had risen to 41,000. “I had zero expectations,” she says. The candidacy only required answering two questions. Explain what her favorite product was and comment on why she was interested and why she should be the one chosen. With the same self-confidence that, once selected and in the middle of the work day, he commented what he thought of each of the products they gave him to try, Gisbert answered that, at his age, he needed to increase the anecdotes to tell on Tinder (the quotes). “In addition to my experiences in life, I wanted to have more things to tell,” she explains normally. In her response, she also indicated that, despite creating digital content for the Barcelona museum where she works, she does not have social networks, although she follows them closely. The product that she marked as her favorite, a mix of dried fruits: “Mister 5, a Mister Corn classic.”
The strategy of marketing Grefusa changed, approximately, in 2015, according to its current CEO and grandson of the brand’s founder, Agustín Gregori. “It was difficult for us to change, but we had to take advantage of our size, much smaller than that of large multinationals, to develop powerful and fast actions because the consumer moves much faster than us.” Hiring a taster is not the only way in which the company has implemented one of its premises, proximity to its consumers, one of what they call “grefuvalues”. Gregori remembers when in 2012 they detected what they considered a failure in the production process of the Tijuana Pipes, in whose bags several pipes appeared stuck together, the so-called “glues” and they invested in the quality improvement program so that they were all homogeneous. “Consumers started calling for the sticks and saying that they were like a prize when they came out and, immediately, we reversed the program so that the Tijuanas would have sticks,” he says.
This contact with the consumer is constant. Each week a “route day” is set and, for half a day, factory employees who wish to do so, from any department, accompany a salesperson to see what is sold, how and why. They ask in establishments and to consumers. And the company then collects that data just as it does with the suggestions that come through the brand’s website. “They are valued, classified, assigned a potential, a completion period and the calculation of the necessary investment,” explains Gregori. “We have active listening. We are small, but innovative, and we dare,” he adds.
Not everything has been successful on that path in search of an audience that, to a large extent, is young people “who are looking for new experiences and surprises.” They marketed some pipes with an energy drink flavor that barely lasted on the market, but that some complained about when it disappeared.
Agustín Gregori admits that his is a “grateful” product, related to leisure time and very cheap. Therefore, to reach 153 million in turnover – 12% more than the previous year – and profits of 18.6 million euros, Grefusa has sold around 300 million bags in 2022.
In a market like that of snacks, which in Spain moves 3,200 million euros a year, nuts, with 1,200 million, or French fries, with 600 million, Grefusa has understood that, to grow, it had to enter the “large” categories. Thus, for next year the firm is preparing new products on nuts with which they intend to reach quotas such as those achieved with Piponazo or Mister Corn’s fried corn. After the closure of their factory in Valladolid, they have built another one in Alzira (Valencia), with an investment of eight million euros, to be able to separate production, so that the baked goods are free of traces of nuts and these are free of any trace of gluten and thus be consumable by celiacs and allergy sufferers. Because, despite this dynamic and changing market, Gregori assures that they do not forget that it is a food and that is why they have celebrated their 20 years without using palm oil (“which cost us a fortune,” he affirms), or that, despite Because “flavor is the most important thing,” they launched the production of “snatt’s,” a healthier snack made with legume flours.
After touring the laboratory, different spaces in the product manufacturing process and the warehouse where thousands of bags are accumulated before they are released to the market, Grefusa’s taster, Elena Gisbert, went to the tasting room. There he was faced with unidentified packaging and tried and evaluated each of the products: “This has a little tomato flavor but it is not something that stays in the mouth, it is light and goes away immediately,” he said about one of them before the attentive gaze of several members of the brand’s team. “I’m going to be honest, huh,” she warned.
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