Empresas FoieGood, the ethical foie from Soria from ducks that are not fattened
Companies 1880: ten generations of the family of the most expensive nougat in the world and the favorite of sheikhs and 'royals'
The week of the long weekend is hectic for
Alfonso Jiménez Rodríguez-Vila
(49).
These are "very complicated" days, he admits, because he has to ship more than
90,000 boxes of capons, poulardas, suckling pigs and lambs from Dueñas
(Palencia) to all of Spain.
80% of these 'festive boxes' are
the Christmas Eve dinner for 500,000 Spaniards
(the rest end up on the tables on Christmas Day) and everything has to be ready because the idea of leaving someone without a capon or pularda makes the person sick.
CEO of Cascajares.
17 years ago it happened to him
, 500 boxes were left undistributed in Madrid
due to a transport problem and he himself took a van and distributed them.
Since then
he has a network of taxi drivers
in the main cities "just in case," Jiménez reveals to LOC.
"Anything before leaving someone without dinner
," she settles.
His capons have become a Christmas classic, so much so that the company he founded at the age of 19 will close the year with a
turnover of 12.5 million.
The forecast is
to reach 20 in five years
with the opening of new markets.
Cascajares has been in Canada for a few years now,
where they started with Thanksgiving turkeys and continued with his mother's cheeks and meatballs with tomato, and they export to several other countries in Europe.
Several airlines serve their dishes in Business.
In Spain, Christmas continues to be its main course.
"Our competition is the grandmothers
and there are fewer of those who cook, unfortunately. The grandmothers of today are young and no longer beat each other up in the kitchen. They want to sit at the table like the rest of the family, that's why we It's going so well," he confesses.
Jiménez also assures that
"fear of the mother-in-law" is another of the points in his favor.
"It is a real terror of looking bad and many buy from us because they know that dinner will be perfect. Whoever tries Cascajares repeats it," she proudly confesses.
Getting here has not been easy.
Alfonso, the youngest of 10 siblings, started caring for capons at the age of 14 on his mother's farm.
When he was 19, he sold them in restaurants and made a little money - "he sold each capon for 5,000 pesetas" - because
the business didn't cost him a penny:
he fed his birds with corn and cereals that he took from his father, a engineering engineer. Caminos who raised cows and other animals on the same farm.
He was amused until one day the kid gave him 1,000 capons and he had enough.
He put a lock on the animal feed store and
kicked him out of the family farm so that he could study for a career
, like his brothers.
Alfonso Jiménez and his partner, Francisco Iglesias, with canned capons, their first success.EM
"I had to start buying cereal,
my father told me that it was going to ruin me...
to stop," he recalls.
Alfonso sold 300 capons and was left hanging with the remaining 700.
He came up with the idea of canning them in a factory in Palencia in the style of French duck confit.
His father predicted the total ruin not only of his son, but of the entire family.
Those cans, however, were a success.
The
hit
, however, came in 2004, with the
wedding of Prince Felipe and Letizia Ortiz
.
By then Alfonso had obtained a loan of 180,000 euros - his father, always so optimistic, asked him to see if the bank's risk manager was on leave that day - and had set up the Dueñas factory.
Ever since the royal engagement was announced,
she insisted that his capons appear on the wedding menu.
29 meetings later in Madrid with Casa Real and Jockey, the restaurant in charge of the banquet, he succeeded:
his capons beat sea bass, the other
politically correct
option that Casa Real was considering as a main course.
Alfonso Jiménez and his partner, Francisco Iglesias, in the 90s.EM
One of the reasons why they opted for their capons is the
social work that Cascajares developed
-and continues to develop- with his Foundation, dedicated to people with
intellectual disabilities.
Cascajares' election was a
"state secret."
They didn't let them let go until the day of the wedding, that rainy May 22, 2204, although he couldn't take it anymore and two days before he told his father.
"He told me that
I was going to suffer a bioterrorist attack, that I was going to destroy all the reigning houses
if I didn't put a security guard to watch over the capons. I was so scared that I went to the slaughterhouse and
personally took the 600 capons to the Royal Palace
", he recounts.
A farsighted man, Alfonso had prepared another 200 birds "just in case."
They were not needed and
they were sent to as many social chronicle journalists, "from Peñafiel and Jesús Mariñas to Rosa Villacastín."
With the permission of Casa Real, he was able to reveal that his were the wedding capons and the success was such that
mothers called Cascajares
to request the same capons for their daughters' weddings.
Alfonso was also
able to replicate Jockey's dish,
with the stuffing of dried apricots, pine nuts and foie that they adapted to sell in their famous boxes.
Billing shot up like a rocket
and went from one million to six.
Since then the company has expanded with
another headquarters in Quebec, Canada
, where they went to sell
Thanksgiving turkeys to the United States
- 48 million are consumed in a single night.
There, in addition, they have developed a series of
Spanish dishes
, such as veal a la jardinera or cheeks in sauce, which are sweeping because, he says, Canadians highly value European cuisine.
"We already sell more in Montreal than in Madrid
and in Canada than in Europe", he reveals.
Alfonso Jiménez with Ágatha Ruiz de la Prada and Josemi Rodríguez-Sieiro at this year's capon auction.EM
The Foundation is also more than consolidated with the
annual capon auction that is held at the Palace
and in which many celebrities participate, such as the Infanta Elena or Boris Izaguirre.
Josemi Rodríguez-Sieiro, who is Alfonso's cousin,
is the president of the board of trustees of the Cascajares Foundation.
In the last 23 years they have raised 1.8 million euros.
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Capons are his passion, but the CEO of Cascajares has embarked on another adventure:
turkeys raised in the wild and fed on acorns
, like pigs, on a farm in Salamanca where they are grazed by a mastiff.
"It is a beautiful project because it recovers a
Salma tradition
from years ago," he says.
The children herded the turkeys that ate insects in the summer and acorns in the fall.
Then they were sold alive in Madrid, Barcelona or Bilbao for 5 pesetas (hence the expression
100 pesetas 20 turkeys
).
"I am very excited. It will be a
super premium turkey
," he predicts.
PS: In the end his father recognized his success.
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