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Borja Sánchez Campos
.
Bilbao, 1970. Businessman, president of Real Conservera Española, recognized as the best seafood canner in the world by 2021 World's Best 101 Canned Food Products from the Sea.
How do you become the best canning company in the world? Having a great team, from the shellfish workers to all the people who work in the factory, and everyone putting a lot of love when doing their work. And having a great product such as Galician seafood. I believe that this is the key to success. A good anchovy, a good mussel is ... A delight, a delicacy, a delicacy. Quality preserves are a gourmet dish. In fact, we want to reposition Galician preserves at the level of foie, caviar, salmon, and large bites. From an organoleptic point of view, sturgeon caviar and hedgehog caviar are 90% the same. And what is the difference? Well, they have been able to sell sturgeon. It is sold at a very expensive price and instead the hedgehog, an exquisite delicacy that is like taking a bite of the sea to your mouth,it sells infinitely cheaper. We want the products we have to be valued, starting with Spain and then all other countries in the world. For me, ours are the best products in the world, but we don't know how to sell them well. Are we bad at marketing? It's not our strong suit, no. Other countries, with products that do not have the quality of ours, make a
packing
wonderful, they present it very well, they make these products sell expensive and are considered better than ours, when they are not. So do we drag a certain inferiority complex? I think so. We need more people like Amancio Ortega, like Rafa Nadal, like Fernando Alonso ... People who have done very well, who are proud of what they do, who go through life without any complexes, who have reached number one, who he has succeeded. And that when they are asked if they are the best at what they do, they do not have false modesty, they say "Yes, we are", and they continue to ratify themselves in what they do. It seems to me that this is the path we have to follow. Can a low price negatively affect a product? On many occasions yes. When a product is reasonably priced, it is often thought of as mediocre.Juan Mari Arzak always tells us that when sardines are expensive, people will kill to eat them. Now, since they are a cheap product, people do not value them. But when there begins to be a shortage of sardines, and it is already beginning to be, they will be valued and we will throw our hands at our heads for not having known how to appreciate them before. We have to value the products we have, teach the rest of the world to value them and not have complexities in selling what is ours as the best, because it is the best. The preserves from La Real Conservera Española are not exactly cheap ... Indeed, our preserves are not cheap. But, apart from the awards our products receive, we are the cannery with which the most Michelin-starred chefs work. When, for example, there are no fresh clams on the market and they need that product for their dishes,they use ours. This means that the quality of our products is extremely high. The products of La Real Conservera Española are sold in 24 countries. Which countries are the ones that most value Galician preserves? Italy, France, Spain and Portugal. In Italy what they appreciate the most are our anchovies. In France they especially value the xouba, the Galician sardine. And Portugal is quite similar to Spain. A can of preserves, is it better to eat it soon? Cans last for many, many years. We did an analysis of some of our cans that were 10, 12, 14 years old and were perfect. They took them to a lab, looked at them and told us they were like the first day. In fact, canned foods often gain over the years, because they remain as if they were butter. In France they call it macerating, not aging.And in France they can pay you up to 500 euros for a can of sardines. What's the biggest mistake we make with tin cans? Putting them in the fridge. In the fridge, cooling is slow, and what it does is break down the microfibers of the mollusk and can leave it too soft. Cans should be stored at room temperature. And, just before eating them, the cans of products in broth, in sea water with brine or in pickled sauce must be put in ice water for three or four minutes, because that way the cooling is fast and when you eat it you feel that the product it explodes in your mouth. The cans of products in oil do not have to be cooled, because the oil remains cloudy. Do you notice climate change? Yes, we noticed. We don't want to end seafood, we don't want to end fish.And one way to do it is by selling more expensively. We want to be able to pay more to our shellfish workers, to those people who have rhema, who spend their lives picking shellfish by hand, while in Asia they catch it by putting huge machines that destroy everything. And we also want there to be fallow in the sea, to let the marine ecosystem rest and recover, because if we fish indiscriminately there are species that will disappear. How do you get to be president of the best canning company in the world? We started on this by helping a friend. This friend had a family tradition in the world of canning, this company was in fact the extension of one that began operating in 1920. But that person turned out to be a frog and when Antonio Soto, one of the partners, took the company into liquidation,He said he didn't have the heart to leave all the families of the employees on the street. And I didn't have it either. So we bought back his share from that man, took the reins of the company and gave it a spin. We are now positioned in 24 countries. It is nothing more than putting love to it and being lucky enough to have a
Productazo
as is the Galician seafood and the fish that we have in Spain.
Mussels, cockles, anchovies ... What do they taste like?
They remind me of when I had an aperitif with my father at a bar counter.
My father was in love with mussels, and that moment of the aperitif I remember as something very endearing.
My father passed away 23 years ago when he was only 57 years old.
Since then, every time they open a can of mussels and I see a father with a son, I remember mine.
My father was very enjoyable, he loved to eat and I am sure that now he would really enjoy seeing the success we are having with Real Consergasgavera Española.
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