The SanLucar cultivation guidelines

Did you also love eating Grandma’s fruit as a child? Fruit simply tasted the best freshly picked from her garden! For SanLucar’s founder Stephan Rötzer, this is how it was too. And because he wanted to share that feeling with everyone, he decided to start SanLucar. Since 1993, SanLucar has been growing more than 35 different fruit and vegetable varieties world-wide in more than 90 countries around the world – in harmony with man and nature.

Whether it’s an apple, berry, tomato, banana or pineapple – all of our fruits are grown in each of our growing countries following our strict SanLucar guidelines, which are often stricter than what is legally required. Only in this way can their flavour become naturally very delicious and aromatic. We are often asked what exactly is behind this. This is something we’d like to share with you, of course! That’s why we’ve summarized the factors for this:

Our work to achieve the best flavour already begins with the decision for the growing area: we grow our fruits only where the optimal climate conditions and soil conditions are for the respective fruit.

Only experienced hands are allowed near our products. Many of our growers are traditional companies with decades of experience. And because we have been working with people with what feels like eternity, they know exactly what we care about most: the most natural cultivation as possible. This means that should our plants become ill, we always use beneficial insects to combat this. Only when there is no alternative do we use plant protection products – and only in moderate quantities, of course. This doesn’t only taste good to us, but to independent institutes such as the ÖKO-Test, which are awarding our fruits with top marks due to such excellent results.

Each fruit should have as much time and sun as it needs. That’s why we don’t harvest all of them at the same time, but in several phases. The right time of harvesting is very important – especially with non-climacteric fruits that do not ripen after harvesting: if they have been harvested too early, they cannot ideally ripen to reach their full flavour.

If you harvest them too late, they can spoil more quickly. To be sure that they can be picked, our quality technicians regularly inspect our fields and take random samples. Through various measurements, e.g. of sugar, juice and acid content, they can determine whether the fruits meet our requirements or whether the harvest can wait.

Some of our fruits are very sensitive and react very sensitively to pressure. So in order to protect them, we harvest each fruit by hand.

Mother Nature is one of our most important growing partners. That’s why we focus our attention on resource-conserving cultivation. One of many examples of this is our raised table-top growing on our strawberry fields in Huelva. Because they are not in contact with the soil, diseases are less common and the water can be completely reprocessed. This means we have a 30% lower water consumption. A nice side effect: our employees have much better posture when picking from the raised tables-tops.

Once the fruits have been harvested, they are inspected several times. Damaged and diseased fruits are sorted out. Only the best – those that are healthy and fresh – are kept.

To ensure that our favourites taste as delicious as freshly picked from the field at home, we have also developed an ingenious system for our logistics because fruit and vegetables are natural products and are often very sensitive to pressure and heat. Especially with long distances, the correct transport is therefore all the more important! Once the fruits have been harvested, we cool them to their respective ideal temperature until delivery to the trading partner. For raspberries, this is about 4° C. In this way, we can be certain that our fruit and vegetables come to the shop fresh and crispy.