Just because you’re the grandson of an entrepreneur doesn’t mean life is always a bed of roses, and Miguel Faria is living proof of that. The ever-present figure of his grandfather, Commander Vasco Faria, now aged 83, reminds him of the high standards he must live up to, even in the responsibility entrusted to him: taking over the management of the Focor Group’s agri-food business, which grew out of his grandfather’s hobby of buying up farms. That hobby gave rise to a new business area which, in 2014, was worth 8 million euros.

“My grandfather had – and still has – an extraordinary business acumen, with a seemingly innate ability to foresee the future. It’s not easy to live up to that, but I’ll give it a go,” admits the 32-year-old, who holds two degrees: one in automotive engineering from England and another in marketing management from Portugal.

By training, the first thing he did when challenged to take charge of the four farms and four estates that his grandfather had "collected" was to handle the marketing of the wine, grapes, and olive oil produced between Minho and Alentejo. "Before, wine was sold simply with a label stuck on the bottle, the boxes were blank, it didn't matter. It was believed that if the product was good, it would sell well. Now it's not like that, the competition is fierce and building a brand is very difficult," explains the director of the agri-food sector of the group whose main activity is textile dyes and which achieved a total turnover of 23 million euros last year.

The most valuable brands in the food sector are Vinho Verde (Encosta do Xisto) and Alentejo wine (Vale Barqueiros), with the latter also set to launch a range of gourmet olive oil. Olive oil is, in fact, the crop that covers the largest area (1,100 hectares), whilst wine (240 hectares) brings the brands greater recognition.

“When it comes to the retail sector, agriculture today is much more about the market than the product itself, even though we’re not in the market to engage in a price war but to focus on quality,” explains Miguel Faria. Even so, regarding the olive oil he has been selling in bulk “to the major market players”, the manager insists he has no cause for complaint about the prices.

“We’ve been doubling our prices year on year, which is why we’ve been putting off launching our own-brand range,” he explains. But the manager eventually admits that there is a strategy behind this “miracle of price multiplication”: “We’re always keeping an eye on the Spanish harvests and olive oil prices, and we only release our own stock when they’ve run out of olive oil and the price goes up,” explains Miguel Faria.

Last year, they produced 720 tonnes of olive oil, 50 per cent of which was exported to Spain and Italy. As for wine, out of a total of 520,000 litres, the majority (66 per cent) is sold on the domestic market and the remainder is exported to Brazil, Canada, Luxembourg, Denmark, Lithuania and Switzerland. At the same time, 1,500 tonnes of grapes are ‘sold to other producers’, in a business which, although traditional, increasingly involves research and innovation.

“Ever since my grandfather’s time, we have had a partnership with the University of Cáceres which enabled us, at a time when the country was lagging far behind in agriculture – in the early 1980s – to be the first to introduce drip irrigation. Now, we are going to trial a new technique for planting olive groves,” says the manager.

“Portugal lacks genuine managers in the agricultural sector. What I realised at the last trade fair we attended, in Düsseldorf, is that we manage to be unbeatable in terms of value for money, but we’re neither very cheap nor very good,” he concludes, adding: “I never thought I’d end up in agriculture; I was asked to give it a go and I liked it. That’s how it has to be; you need passion and the ability to deal with the unexpected.”

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