Greenway Farms (Pty) Ltd
Fruitful EntrepreneurshipWriter: Matthew StaffProject Manager: Joshua MannRugani Carrots represents a move into 21st century food often neglected in South Africa, and the Company behind the now renowned products – Greenway Farms – is now honing in on a diversification strategy to ensure even more concerted growth in the future.Formulated in 1988, the Rugani journey to today’s thriving family-run enterprise can be split into numerous succinct periods of evolution off the back of financial struggles, outdated methods, industry epiphanies, fiscal revivals and revolutionary breakthroughs. Present throughout all of the above though has been the Managing Director, Vito Rugani; an executive who has never been one to rest on his laurels or to avoid exploring the unexplored in order to achieve the seemingly impossible.He recalls back to the Company’s early days: “My business partner and I brought the Company together in our late 20s-early 30s having both come from farming backgrounds ourselves, and we began with a very traditional farming business with numerous crops, everything done by hand and the products then loaded up to be taken to the various markets.“However, by the early ‘90s we realised we were going nowhere; our wages were low but still a vast percentage of our turnover, so something was wrong with our business.”A subsequent foray into international domains brought to light the mistakes that were being made, not just by Greenway Farms, but indeed much of South Africa’s farming community. Australia’s model, for example, emphasised that such processes hadn’t been used there for nigh on a century, and it was clear that an…
