Incuso oil relies on a pact with farmers against the abandonment of olive groves
In exchange for compliance with a protocol guaranteeing a quality product, the olives are paid between 30 and 50 per cent more: founder Pasquale Bonsignore's approach borrowed from design and restanza
5' min read
Key points
5' min read
The parcelling out of oil production is often cited as one of the limitations of the Italian extra virgin market. There are in fact a myriad of small farms with small olive groves. There are those who take care of the family olive grove out of passion and tradition, or consider it at best a second job. The oil is used for their own family, perhaps sold off the books to a few local buyers, and the rest is picked up by wholesalers at often very low prices. With the result that over time the olive groves are abandoned, perhaps at the time of the failed generation changeover.
One of the 'solutions' generally evoked by insiders is the switch to an intensive and highly mechanised oliviculture such as the one that led Spain to become the world market leader, whereby the fate of the Iberian harvest now decides the prices of olives that have become 'commodities'.
Quality is enough?
."If olives lose their identity, they are not paid fairly. What if instead we focused on a model that believes in quality and surpasses Spain in added value? ". This is the question posed by Pasquale Bonsignore, the creator and owner of Incuso, a company that produces olives and oil in Castelvetrano (but not only).
Bonsignore's roots are in the Belìce valley but he has lived a long time away from Sicily: growing up in the Neapolitan area, studying design in Milan (which remains his headquarters), abroad: Paris, the United States, Latin America. Then, on a trip when he returned to the Belice Valley for a family reunion - "as he did every year at Easter and as I used to do in summer as a child", he recounts - he was struck by so many abandoned olive groves and the idea of Incuso was born with the aim of giving an alternative destiny to those fields.
"I try to apply my training as a designer to agricultural products from a process perspective," says Bonsignore, "a method usually associated with industrial design that leads to an innovative approach and creates the conditions for a paradigm shift. My starting point is that new sustainable relationships are possible that can reverse the trend towards the disappearance of peasant agriculture. I try to build a process that substitutes sharing for conflict'.
Between Design and Fair Compensation
Incuso's supply chain model envisages ensuring an adequate income for the work carried out by the olive grower-conferers in exchange for compliance with a 'cultivation protocol' drawn up with experts and the farmers themselves, which leads to the results necessary to have a range of quality products, but above all one that stands out from others on the market thanks to certain special characteristics, for example working on yields (as for wine) and harvesting the olives at appropriate times depending on the oil to be obtained. To this is then added the work of valorisation at the level of communication and distribution.
The same model was then applied to the capperi di Pantelleria and the pomodoro campano.
