Hearts of gold: Pronaca, Ecuador's largest food company, sets its sights to dinner tables abroad.

For Ecuador's biggest food company--and its largest employer, even larger than state-owned oil company Petroecuador--dominating the domestic processed-meat market is just not enough. La Procesadora Nacional de Alimentos (Pronaca) wants to be one of the largest canned-good producers in the world. The company still has a long way to go, yet it does seem to have what it takes to get started: hearts of palm. In only 10 years, Pronaca has managed to grab control of 27% of the world's market in the delicacy, once a Depression-era staple but now often served alongside salads and as an hors d'oeuvres.

Pronaca has been key to Ecuador's reign as the world's largest producer of canned hearts of palm--a US$70 million global market--overtaking Brazil and Costa Rica. "We are the main supplier for supermarket chains in Europe like Casino and Carrefour," says Gonzalo Moya, general manager of Inaexpo, a Pronaca subsidiary that sold $18 million in hearts of palm to 25 countries in 2004. "We are the only company in the world to supply Wal-Mart's brand of hearts of palm." Brazil, the largest consumer of the product, is the largest producer of fresh hearts of palm worldwide.

Hearts of palm have meant big business for Pronaca, which wants to take what it has learned so far and expand into similar, but better-selling, products. "Opening those doors has helped us to identify opportunities to diversify, since the hearts of palm market has a ceiling," says Moya. "Already this year we have opened an artichoke hearts plant, and we want to repeat what we have done with hearts of palm." U.S. consumers eat seven times more artichoke hearts than hearts of palm, for instance.

Artichoke hearts are just the beginning for the Pronaca unit, which describes itself as a canned-goods company. "Today it's hearts of palm and artichoke hearts, tomorrow it will be asparagus and peppers" says Moya. "It all depends on what products we're good at." While hearts of palm have been good for the bottom line, the market can be fragile. In 2002, after Argentina's economy imploded, the Southern Cone country imported just 100 shipping containers of the product. As a result, a quarter of the global market disappeared, according to Inaexpo.

Today, hearts of palm account for a small portion of Pronaca's overall sales, which in 2004 hit $405.5 million. Numbers aside, Pronaca says hearts of palm have been the benchmark for breaking into international markets. To continue doing so, Pronaca and a Brazilian partner recently built a hearts-of-palm processing plant in Brazil for $4 million.

Pronaca isn't stopping at vegetables. It's also the largest poultry and pork producer in Ecuador and a major producer office and seeds, as well as other canned goods. The processing company, which today employs almost 7,000, was founded in 1959 by European immigrants. It started off as a poultry importer. In the 1970s it ventured into processing poultry and built farms, in order to diversify. Pronaca sells the bulk of its production in Ecuador, it yet ships abroad 35% of Ecuador's tilapia, a type offish, and 8% of the country's shrimp exports. It also is developing a line of processed chicken, primarily for export to Colombia.

Pronaca has 40,000 customers, 4,500 suppliers and generates more then 60,000 indirect jobs in Ecuador. "Pronaca's brands and products are excellent, we always want to have them available for our customers," says Jorge Hernandez, manager of Comercial de Supermaxi, Ecuador's largest supermarket chain with more than half a billion in sales in 2004. "This is the best Ecuadoran agribusiness company, we admire it very much and we are proud to be one of their most important business partners."

Free trade. Lucio Ingarevalo Moscoso, general manager of Plasticos Litoral, a $22 million-a-year Ecuadoran company that supplies packaging to Pronaca, says Pronaca is five times larger then its closest competitor. And, although no company threatens Pronaca's leadership position, free-trade agreements do pose a threat. "Especially if the categories that Pronaca deals with aren't protected," Ingarevalo says, "I feel that the surplus of chicken and beef that the U.S. has not only would hurt Ecuador but all of Latin America."

In the meantime, Pronaca will remain the market leader due to the quality of its products, says Myriam Altamirano, marketing manager at Merck, a multinational pharmaceutical company that works with Pronaca. "For Merck, Pronaca is a very special customer," she says, "If Pronaca buys something, other companies also go out and buy it."