Sidestepping the crisis by going back to the soil

When the going gets tough, the tough get going. Despite daily tales of woe - entire families out of work, elderly ladies evicted from their homes, hordes of underpaid workers struggling to cover their bills - there are instances of Spaniards who have managed to pull themselves out of the hole through their entrepreneurial spirit. That, and plenty of hard work.

The following people might be viewed as the forerunners of a new era in which Spaniards will increasingly be driven to create their own jobs, considering the labor market's inability to provide them in the context of a seemingly never-ending crisis. In a country with low entrepreneurship and a marked preference for safe jobs, where becoming a civil servant has been the dream of entire generations and setting up a business has presented more hurdles than the Grand National, success stories like these - from sophisticated to rural, from global to local - can provide inspiration and a much-needed sense that all, perhaps, is not yet lost.

"The first month we had revenues of 50 euros and nearly called it quits"

"Except for my mother's chickens, everything else has been mortgaged"

Rosa Vañó certainly never thought she'd live to see the day when a half-liter bottle of extra virgin olive oil produced at her own family's oil mill would be displayed on the shelves of New York's most select gourmet boutiques. Especially not when she thinks back to the beginning.

"The first month we had revenues of 50 euros and were on the verge of calling it quits. But we were patient," she says.

It started eight years ago, when Rosa turned 40. She thought this would be a good time to undertake a new professional challenge, so she quit her executive job at Coca-Cola - before that she'd worked at Warner and Universal - while her brother Francisco did the same at the bank where he worked. Together, they decided to transform their father's 200-year-old almazara into a producer and bottler of the most select oils. The results have been spectacular: Their brand, Castillo de Canena, is now sold in 40 countries, and it was classified this year as the best in the world by the Italian guide Flos Olei, a cult publication in the sector.

At the Vañó family estate - around 1,500 hectares of olive groves in the area of La Loma - harvest work has begun on a variety known as arbequina, even though there is still a month left to go before the official start of the harvest season. Other producers have begun doing the same, in an effort to buck the trend in a sector where, ironically, Spain is the world's leading producer of olive oil but sells 80 percent of its production wholesale to Italy, where it is bottled and sold abroad on the strength of that country's reputation.

"Wholesale will not pull you out of poverty; the market pays for quality oil," notes the commercial director of Castillo de Canena.

And so Rosa used her experience in the private sector and her four spoken languages to design a marketing plan that would position her brand on the international stage. These days, foreign buyers represent 70 percent of sales. First it was the United States, where this year Castillo de Canena won the Golden Sofi Award - the Oscars of the food world - and later in southeast Asia, where the oil is highly appreciated for its healthy properties.

"A key factor was how the internet has brought Mediterranean culture closer (to other cultures), and also the outreach work done by Spain's top chefs," says Vañó, who was named Businesswoman of the Year in 2008. Not bad, for a sector that is still dominated by men.

"It's a matter of patience first and talent later, and if you have both, that's even better," says this mother of three who sleeps 200 nights of the year outside Spain because of her constant business trips.

Patience is something that Lina Solla definitely knows about. The crisis hit her several years ahead of time: it was 2002, and the sinking of the oil tanker Prestige off the Galician coast left her seafood company on the brink of bankruptcy just four years after she'd founded it. A government grant saved her at the last minute; the company, Linamar, now employs 50 people and posts annual revenues of seven million euros.

But it came at a cost: "Except for my mother's chickens, everything else has been mortgaged," she wryly notes.

Linamar specializes in the sale of mussels through a system common in industrial food production called modified atmosphere packaging, which enables her to keep the molluscs alive for up to 10 days after the sale day by lowering the oxygen content inside the package and introducing other gases, typically nitrogen or carbon dioxide. What Solla did was apply the same technique commonly used for packaged, ready-to-eat lettuce and other vegetables.

"They told me I was crazy," she recalls. Now, distribution chains fall all over each other to buy her products. "I turned down [major supermarket chain] Mercadona four times before finally saying yes." Linamar sells a lot in France and Germany, and is now exploring other markets like the US, Russia and Dubai.

Solla is a high school dropout who ventured into this business through her ex-husband. Aged 28, divorced and with two kids in her care, she opened her first office inside the clothing store of a friend who closed her business in the winters. Much later came the Linamar plant in Cambados.

This self-made woman is very critical of the traditional boss figure. "It bothers me to see businesspeople who make a difference between their own assets and the company's assets. My company is my asset. If I don't believe in it, who will?" she asks. "Are the directors of Cepsa, Telefónica or BBVA really businesspeople? The only thing they're risking is losing their jobs."

Solla still remembers the times when she had to use part of her mother's pension to make ends meet. Her sons, then in their twenties, had to put in their share of work at the packaging plant. "It used to be that young people always worked in the summer. But we've raised an indolent generation."

Although her company is weathering the crisis well, Solla cannot help but note the growing numbers of résumés she gets from biologists, economists and lawyers rather than plant workers.

"Politicians must foment job creation," she says. "Someone who's been unemployed for two years cannot feel good at a personal level."

She also criticizes the eligibility criteria for accessing state subsidies. "Often you have to advance the money before getting paid, so the people who benefit are those who already have the capital, not those who have a project."

Mercedes Peso and Yolanda Rico definitely have a project, although for now it is rather smaller in scope. One might say they are still growing their business, quite literally. Both were married mothers of two who were out of a job, until one day they decided to "adopt" some abandoned vegetable patches in Nalda, a village in La Rioja.

Now, 100 families pay a monthly fee of 50 euros for the privilege of coming here every week and taking home six or seven kilos of fresh, organically grown fruits and vegetables. This income, plus what they make harvesting plums, pays the wages of Peso (in charge of the land) and Rico (in charge of commercial affairs), plus the rental on a storage room with refrigerator chambers.

It started a couple of years ago, when a local association decided the time had come to do something about all the abandoned farmland and, at the same time, about the crisis. The landowners generously granted use of the empty plots, and the association did the rest.

"Working the land is no effort because I like it. I always had a vegetable garden, but I now also have a salary thanks to this project," says Mercedes Peso, who grew up picking strawberries and cucumbers with her parents. Every morning she drives a van to collect the people who will help her that day - some are volunteers, others apprentices. Together they go to the various estates where the huertas are located. They water the artichokes, pamper the lettuces, pull out the leeks, load the tomatoes - whatever it takes.

"People are increasingly viewing farm work as a career option," says Mercedes. "You sow, you watch things grow. Working the land is like having a child, you plant a seed and then..."

Three hectares of fruit and vegetables and one plum grove have created a sustainable project that remains firmly rooted in the ground where it got started. "We could have more, but we don't want this to turn into a macro-project. What we would like, though, is for other villages to do the same thing so we could then trade products, like our grandparents used to do."

It would seem like grandparents hold the key to many things in these times of uncertainty. Take Laura and Ana Marcén - they staved off the crisis by applying three rules they learned from their grandparents: you cannot win something without risking something, to sell is to lose, and the only thing one cannot ever learn to do is to sing.

Their father grew wheat and put them through college on the proceeds, but unemployment drove them back to their home town of Leciñena, in the arid Monegros area of Zaragoza province. There, they turned to the family tradition and set up a flour mill and a bakery. The bread that comes out of their oven, made with local organic wheat - the kind one no longer finds in industrial baked goods - made one woman cry with joy because the taste reminded her of her childhood.

The Marcén family has brought back a wheat variety called Aragón 03, and now the orders keep pouring in. They have eight employees, their own store in Zaragoza, and supply several hotels and restaurants with their baked goods. Their bread is delicious and lasts for days. Of course, it is rather more fattening than the fare one finds in supermarkets.

"Yes, I'm sorry, it's true. When things taste this good..." admits Laura.

The project began with Uncle Juan José Marcén, a microbiologist who was interested in the wheat that the Marcén grandparents used to grow. Their father Daniel embraced the crop and grew it without pesticides or herbicides. Now, the tradition lives on through Laura, who studied food science but never found the right job, and Ana, a philology graduate who ended up singing in an orchestra. They have a brother, Jesús, who makes the dough, but he is not to be seen at regular hours because of his early morning schedule. Their mother, Merdeces, is in charge of accounting and manning the phones.

"We could sell more, but we're going at top speed as it is. We've bought a new mill. Maybe we could hire someone else and open a new store, but we're taking it slowly. Until the third year, though, we were not a proper business, we were more like an NGO!"

The bakery is barely five years old and it is already making profits and earning awards. The Marcéns risked something, and they learned to make bread and cakes. After all, singing is the only thing you can never really learn properly.

Sibling teams and food, it seems, are a winning combination in Spain. Isabel and Álvaro Ortiz are yet another example, in this case with a technology-based project that underscores the business possibilities afforded by the internet to those without initial assets like land or grants.

Isabel, 29, worked for an auditing firm. Álvaro, 31, did the odd internet-related job. Two years ago, they figured that Isabel's job would not hold out much longer, and turned to their common passion for organic food for inspiration. At the apex of the economic crisis, they founded an online store called Mumumío that works as a platform for farmers and growers to sell their products to clients across Spain. The first month, they had a total of seven orders. "Now we get hundreds," they say. The company has four workers and several contributors.

The website focuses on quality, mostly organically grown products like Asturian cheeses, seafood, Galician meat and Valencian oranges. The idea is to bring the traditional food market to one's home through the internet. At first, neither the producers nor the target customers believed this could work.

"That was until everyone began realizing that here was a chance to bring the real flavors of food to your own home; for producers it was an unheard of chance to get their products everywhere in a matter of hours, without their practically having to do anything at all."