Público
May — 2011
ADRIANO CASAL RIBEIRO
Traditional Portuguese products lack strategy
Going against the pessimism in the Portuguese character, this commercial airline pilot decided to promote his country by using its traditional products. They are good! All you need to know is how to sell them, he claims. In order to do that, he created José Gourmet and took the sardine cans to high-end restaurants.
How does a commercial airline pilot become interested in canned products?
I lived away from Portugal for five, six years and I always found it confusing to see that we have so many amazing products and we can’t sell them abroad. I started thinking about it. I am a pilot, but my whole life doesn’t revolve around that. I am a Portuguese citizen who is concerned about anything related to my country. I believe our cuisine is amazing. We have excellent quality products and I decided to draw up a strategy to commercialise them abroad. We are lacking sales strategies, we don’t have a marketing strategy, no brands, so that’s what we are trying to achieve.
Where do José Gourmet´s products come from?
I select products which I believe have the desired quality and I get in touch with the producers to ask them if they are interested in my brand.
I then proceed to develop packaging – I work with a friend, Luís Mendonça (known by the artistic name ‘Gémeo Luís’), who is in charge of all the graphic aspect of the project. The canned food project is the one which is more unusual.
The idea is that this tuna is not at all related to the tuna in another package?
It is a different product. We have come to the conclusion that cans, like everything else in Portugal, are underrated – there is a lack of self-esteem, an inferiority complex. We take an Italian cheese and think it’s great, and then we get a Portuguese cheese from the mountains, like “Queijo da Serra” or one from the Azores – the very good one – and you don’t think it is worth as much as the Italian one. We always consider that our products are ranked at a lower level than the others, up there. I have this association with a good friend, Luís Baena, who has already prepared dinners by serving only canned products, such as risotto with squids in ragout sauce. For each can, we have prepared a flyer comprising two recipes by Luís Baena: one for children in the kitchen, and a second one for gourmet adults (he has already prepared two or three of these at ‘Peixe’, the restaurant in Lisbon). And he also prepared a dinner party [at restaurant Manifesto, Lisbon] with Vasco Ramirez [from Ramirez canned food], in which Vasco brought the cans and Luís prepared about 15 different dishes. Imagine being 42 years old, having associated canned food your whole life to an industry of smelly fish, and now sitting down at the table of a high-end restaurant, with its traditional flavours, prepared in a truly revolutionary way.
Is that the revolution they propose?
Exactly. To promote the requalification of cans, bearing in mind that we are talking about food products that are extremely healthy, although people think they are not [healthy]. And that is precisely what we want to convey, to have people look at canned food in a different way. And that is gradually happening.
On the other hand, José Gourmet wishes to show a different image of the country abroad.
We underestimate ourselves and underrate our products automatically. We have a high-quality base product. I’m not saying they are all quality products. Some of them are not quality products because our market doesn’t pay for quality – there’s a vicious cycle that we don’t seem to break and which makes us want to save every penny. And then there are lots of people whose know-how and expertise are tremendous and unused. Either one is lucky enough to have one’s dairy located on the roadside, and puts up a sign selling ‘Queijo da Serra’ to passers-by, or the dairy is located two or three kilometres away because the highway was built farther away from his/her father’s farm, and he/she ends up not being able to produce, make or sell the cheese. Another one closes the dairy, sells the sheep and is left with ten, twenty or thirty abandoned acres that will burn up during the Summer. He/She decides to abandon the countryside and moves to Damaia […in the suburbs of Lisbon] and ends up living on the minimum income. If we set up a strategy to get that cheese, to value and sell it, we will create a means to fight desertification.
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