Image
The pure leaf's sweet scent perfumes the palate for a few seconds. It is impossible for her to describe the sensation, as " it's one thing to say what it is and another to try it. To try this powerful plant, you would have to grow it or ask indigenous people from Paraguay or Brazil, who have chewed it for centuries" .
This is how Tatiana Velá squez remembers the day she first tried stevia, a plant with properties that outweigh traditional sugar by 300 per cent, with no calories or chemicals and able to maintain the original flavor of the food. It is an alternative that has Chileans and Mexicans savoring the goodness of this healthy product, also cultivated in Colombia and manufactured in Valle del Cauca by Industriales de Amé rica, the owner of Starfit sweetener and supplier of pure stevia extract to companies such as Comercial Cerrillos in Chile and Pulsar Media in Mexico.
The business opportunities identified by PROCOLOMBIA include sugars, syrups and sweeteners that are at the top of the list of products with export potential for Chile, Mexico and Peru. Furthermore, the entity identifies the Valle del Cauca agribusiness sector as one of the most high-tech sectors thanks to the sugar cane plantations.
PROCOLOMBIA president, Maria Claudia Lacouture, explained that Valle del Cauca " is very rich in hydrography, fertile soil, labor and nationally renowned infrastructure, conditions conducive to the development of this sector" .
Proof of this are the 1,100 companies with foreign capital, including 80 multinationals, which have operated in the region since 1940. Valle del Cauca is preparing to host business people from Peru, Chile, Mexico and Colombia at the first macro conference of the Pacific Alliance on June 19 and 20.
In the last year, this Valle del Cauca company, founded in 2006, has exceeded the 120 thousand dollar mark in exports to both countries. This is an impressive figure when considering that it began to position its brand in Cali in 2012 and just three years ago. It started to research the Chilean market, where there was no completely natural sweetener free of chemical or synthetic ingredients. Their product permits thousands of diabetics to sweeten their drinks again without being afraid of the medical side effects.
In Mexico, Starfit was recently endorsed by the Mexican Diabetes Association and this July, a container of export grade product will be shipped to this country. The brand was conceived 10 years ago in the laboratories of the Universidad de San Buenaventura, where, like true alchemists, a group of agribusiness engineering students set themselves the task of finding a way to extract the pure essence of this sweet plant.
From Academia to the International Market
Juan Felipe Ruiz led the group in the year 2000. Months later, he met the recent marketing and international business graduate, Tatiana Vá squez, who on completing her degree was looking for Colombian products with export potential. At the start, they even considered the possibility of selling flowers, because of the fear of not finding enough support to make the sweetener successful. " But we armed ourselves with courage and faith. That was how we decided to invest everything in this product," describes the entrepreneur.
It was three years of constant visits to several of the country's sugar companies that sold artificial sweeteners. The mission was simple but difficult: Prove to them that their extraction method works and that the properties and advantages of stevia satisfy the market that is an increasingly bigger fan of natural products. To sell the idea without the sweetener in you hands seemed imaginary. " We were very young and I think that this made things more difficult for us, but we didn't give up on our goal."
However, some companies supported us to carry out the manufacturing process. This was accompanied by the corporate magic which seems to surround this young trader and that she decided make way for on one of her trips abroad: She went around leaving small samples of the sweetener in all the café s and hotels she went to, with the fortune that now they are about to settle a deal with a supplier from Suriname, also with distribution in Holland.
" Every time I leave the country I think of the marketing possibilities, like a mother thinks of her child. I am very observant and I bring back everything I find about sweeteners. In Chile, I found a very interesting consumer culture. When I was in Asia, I brought back many samples of products they consume there. This is how we started a line of healthy low-calorie products, because innovation is the key to opening the doors of the markets," explained the entrepreneur.
In fact, the company currently has three product lines: Starfit traditional, Starfit with antioxidants and the new product line, Nutralcoffee, a type of instant export coffee that creates a creamy texture made from soy and sweetened with stevia, a product that they are trying to publicize with the support of PROCOLOMBIA to conquer the Asian continent.
But the expansion of Industriales de Amé rica is not over: They are about to open their first office in Houston, United States where they will start to move their products to gain presence in one of the biggest economies.
" Our functional coffee with antioxidants, our natural sweetener that benefits thousands of diabetics and the arrival of new brands in Colombia, because of the trade agreements, will make us have our own brand with recall value. That is why we dedicate ourselves more and more to our three product lines, which are here to stay," she concluded.
