Sovena Group is one of the largest Portuguese

Portugal

Portugal , officially the Portuguese Republic is a country situated in southwestern Europe on the Iberian Peninsula. Portugal is the westernmost country of Europe, and is bordered by the Atlantic Ocean to the West and South and by Spain to the North and East. The Atlantic archipelagos of the...

 agrobusiness holding

Holding company

A holding company is a company or firm that owns other companies' outstanding stock. It usually refers to a company which does not produce goods or services itself; rather, its purpose is to own shares of other companies. Holding companies allow the reduction of risk for the owners and can allow...

 companies, producing cooking oil

Cooking oil

Cooking oil is purified fat of plant origin, which is usually liquid at room temperature ....

s, olive oil

Olive oil

Olive oil is an oil obtained from the olive , a traditional tree crop of the Mediterranean Basin. It is commonly used in cooking, cosmetics, pharmaceuticals, and soaps and as a fuel for traditional oil lamps...

s, olive

Olive

The olive , Olea europaea), is a species of a small tree in the family Oleaceae, native to the coastal areas of the eastern Mediterranean Basin as well as northern Iran at the south end of the Caspian Sea.Its fruit, also called the olive, is of major agricultural importance in the...

s and soap

Soap

In chemistry, soap is a salt of a fatty acid.IUPAC. "" Compendium of Chemical Terminology, 2nd ed. . Compiled by A. D. McNaught and A. Wilkinson. Blackwell Scientific Publications, Oxford . XML on-line corrected version: created by M. Nic, J. Jirat, B. Kosata; updates compiled by A. Jenkins. ISBN...

. It has its own farmyards in Portugal and several other countries.

History

Sovena was founded in the 1956 in Portugal, as a joint-venture of Companhia União Fabril

Companhia União Fabril

The Companhia União Fabril is a Portuguese chemical corporation and a part of Grupo José de Mello.-History:The company was founded by Alfredo da Silva in 1871 and managed by his descendents, including José Manuel de Mello as a family-run business conglomerate. CUF was one of the largest and most...

 (CUF), Macedo e Coelho and Sociedade Nacional de Sabões. After the Carnation Revolution

Carnation Revolution

The Carnation Revolution , also referred to as the 25 de Abril , was a military coup started on 25 April 1974, in Lisbon, Portugal, coupled with an unanticipated and extensive campaign of civil resistance...

 of 1974 and its communist-inspired forcible nationalization

Nationalization

Nationalisation, also spelled nationalization, is the process of taking an industry or assets into government ownership by a national government or state. Nationalization usually refers to private assets, but may also mean assets owned by lower levels of government, such as municipalities, being...

s, Jorge de Mello, an entrepreneur who was a heir of the disbanded CUF conglomerate, rebuilt the company through a new holding called Nutrinveste. In 2004, the Nutrinveste Group sales turnover reached USD 840 million. In 2005 Nutrinveste sold its Compal

Sumol + Compal

Sumol + Compal is a Portuguese food and beverages company specializing in soft drink production and bottling. The company's principal activities are the manufacturing, marketing, bottling, selling, exporting, and distribution of various types of beverages, such as soft drinks, juices, nectars,...

(fruit juices, beverages, tomato products and canned vegetables) and Nutricafés (coffee products) businesses. The new consolidated Sovena Group was created in 2008. By this time intensive olive groves with a high density planting, usually 500 to 750 trees per acre, modern irrigation systems, namely drop by drop, and also more rational fertilization were set up in several locations, mainly in Portugal, Spain, Morrocco and Tunisia.

Organization

Sovena is currently present worldwide. The company has 4 different inter-related business areas that cover the olive oil, table olive, vegetable oil and also soap value chain.

• Sovena Consumer Goods - products, which range from olive oils to vegetable oils, table olives, vinegars and soaps.

Its factories are scattered around Portugal, Spain, the U.S.A. and Tunisia, but it also has commercial teams in Brazil and Angola, and it exports to more than 70 other countries on all 5 continents.

• Sovena Oliseeds - The genesis of the group is vegetable oils.

In both the Portuguese and the Spanish operations, it sells seeds for planting and buys back the production of farmers, that it then used to crush and refine vegetable oils.

• Sovena Agriculture - This business area consists of exploring its own farmyards, or rented ones, in order to grow olive groves and manage olive oil mills where its own olives can be processed. It is a huge project, one of the largest in the World, and it is already working at full speed in Portugal, Spain and Morocco.
• Sovena Biodiesel - Despite not being its core business, the use of vegetable oils to produce biofuels brought the company into the energy business.