A sleepless night led Elena Gisbert, 32, to browse the job listing pages. One of them particularly caught his eye: “Grefusa product taster. Minimum experience: not required. Salary of €1,000 for one working day: including trying out the best and new Grefusa products. If your dream job is to try out the best Grefusa products, have a great experience and get paid for it, great joy is guaranteed.” As a good consumer of snacks and nuts, she couldn’t miss it. At this point there were already more than 38,000 candidates, and by the end of the registration period there were already 41,000. “I had no expectations whatsoever,” he says. All that was required for candidacy was to answer two questions. Explain what your favorite product was and comment on why you were interested and why it should be the product you chose. With the same confidence with which, after choosing in the middle of the working day, he commented on what he thought of each product they gave him to try, Gisbert replied that at his age he had to increase the anecdotes and tell it on Tinder (the quotes ). “In addition to my life experiences, I wanted to have more things to tell,” he explains normally. In his answer, he also pointed out that despite creating digital content for the museum in Barcelona where he works, he does not have social networks, but he follows them closely. He described a nut mix as his favorite product: “Mix 5, a classic from Mister Corn.”
According to current CEO and grandson of the brand’s founder, Agustín Gregori, Grefusa’s marketing strategy changed around 2015. “It was difficult for us to change, but we had to use our size, which is much smaller than that of large multinational companies, to develop effective and rapid actions because the consumer moves much faster than we do.” Hiring a taster is not the only way in which the company realizes one of its premises: proximity to its consumers, one of its so-called “Grefuvalues”. Gregori remembers when in 2012 they discovered what they believed to be a flawed manufacturing process of the Tijuana pipes, in the bags of which several pipes were stuck together, the so-called “adhesives”, and they invested in the quality improvement program so that they all stuck together homogeneously. “Consumers started clamoring for the sticks, saying they were like a prize when they came out, and we immediately reversed the program so Tijuanas would have sticks,” he says.
This contact with the consumer is constant. Each week, a “route day” is set and for half a day, factory employees from all departments that wish to do so accompany a salesperson to see what is being sold, how and why. They ask companies and consumers. And the company then collects this data as well as the suggestions received through the brand’s website. “They are evaluated, classified, assigned a potential, a completion period and the calculation of the necessary investments,” explains Gregori. “We have active listening. We are small, but innovative and daring,” he adds.
In the search for an audience that largely consists of young people “who are looking for new experiences and surprises,” not everything was successful. They marketed some pipes with an energy drink flavor that barely stayed on the market, but some complained about it when it disappeared.
Agustín Gregori admits that it is a “grateful” product, related to leisure and very cheap. In order to achieve a turnover of 153 million – 12% more than last year – and a profit of 18.6 million euros, Grefusa sold around 300 million bags in 2022.
In a market like that of snacks, which in Spain moves 3,200 million euros a year, that of nuts with 1,200 million or that of potato chips with 600 million, Grefusa has understood that in order to grow it has to move into the “big” categories. The company is therefore preparing new nut products for next year with which it hopes to achieve quotas such as those of Piponazo or Mister Corn’s fried corn. After closing their factory in Valladolid, with an investment of eight million euros, they built another one in Alzira (Valencia) to be able to separate production so that the baked goods are free of traces of nuts and these are free of any traces of Gluten and therefore suitable for consumption by celiacs and allergy sufferers. Because despite this dynamic and changing market, Gregori assures that they do not forget that it is a food and that is why they celebrated their 20th anniversary without the use of palm oil (“which cost us a fortune”, he assures), or so Although “taste is the most important thing,” they started producing “Snatt’s,” a healthier snack made from legume flour.
After a tour of the laboratory, various areas in the product manufacturing process and the warehouse where thousands of bags are collected before they go to market, Grefusa’s taster Elena Gisbert headed to the tasting room. There he was confronted with unfamiliar packaging and tried and evaluated each of the products: “It has a little tomato flavor, but it doesn’t stay in the mouth, it’s light and goes away immediately,” he previously said about one of them, to the attentive look of several members of the brand team. “I’m going to be honest, aren’t I,” she warned.
The Grefusa taster, Elena Gisbert, during a product test. Monica Torres
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