Chile: Carozzi kicks off 2023/24 tomato season

At its annual meeting, Carozzi brought together over 170 employees and managers from its Agrozzi plant, which processes over 800,000 tonnes of fruit and vegetables for some 50 countries.
During the day, participants attended a technical talk by agronomist and Doctor of Science, Iván Vidal, who gave an overview of the advantages and benefits of fertigation for processing tomatoes, among other topics.
"Our presence here today is a testament to the stability and ability of the Chilean tomato industry to project itself into the future, thanks to the collaborative work we've been doing for over 30 years with our strategic partners, our growers," he emphasized.

Carozzi buys 34% of Chile's annual tomato production and processes more than 400,000 tonnes of this crop. The company works with more than 3,000 growers who produce fruit, vegetables and grain on over 63,000 hectares of land between the Coquimbo and La Araucania regions.

Drip irrigation and training: initiatives to promote sustainable agriculture
The "Grow Together" program, part of the company's sustainable development strategy, aims to train producers to achieve a satisfactory level of commercial competitiveness, through initiatives designed to improve their productivity and competitiveness, by applying environmentally-friendly practices.
In this context, the program promotes the contract farming model and applies an "open price approach", which brings greater transparency to the marketing process and a greater degree of reliability to the definition of planting programs.

Another example that embraces the sustainability strategy is its support for the optimization and efficiency of water use for irrigation, with its support for tomato growers in the design, implementation, financing and training of technical irrigation systems, which are 95% more efficient than traditional irrigation. Today, almost 90% of the 4,000 hectares planted with tomato crops benefit from this type of irrigation, which has increased the average yield from 65 to 95 tonnes per hectare, improving the crop's productivity and competitiveness.
In addition, the company is promoting fertigation and is automating this technique, implementing new tools and technologies, enabling 90% of the surface areas planted by its processing tomato growers to be cultivated using drip irrigation.

In this regard, Carozzi's Director of International Affairs, Juan Luis Ibarra, emphasized that "talking together about sustainability issues responds to our desire to see our crops develop and project themselves into the future, becoming aware of our impact, measuring our footprint and bringing world-class best practices, certifications and working models to agriculture."

Some complementary data 
Carozzi structures in Chile

Sources: carozzicorp.com, biobiochile.cl