Mounted on a truck, delivering boxes loaded with fruits and vegetables from 4:30 in the morning in the Vila Leopoldina district of Sao Paulo, Brazil, Fabián Gómez spends some of his days as CEO of Frubana, one of the most prolific companies technologies that emerged in Colombia in recent years.
“That’s when I have the opportunity to ask a client what they need, what is missing, what can be better,” said Gómez in an interview with Forbes. “Being the CEO is less sexy than it sounds, but when they see you on the street doing this kind of thing, the team goes out to do the same.”
Customers are restaurants or small businesses who go to an e-commerce platform where they digitally order fruits, vegetables, proteins, groceries and cleaning products.
Fabián Gómez Gutiérrez is an industrial engineer who grew up watching lemons, mangoes and papayas grow in Cachuaba, his father’s farm in Usiacurí, a town in northern Colombia that is part of the department of Atlántico, which inspired not only the name of the company, but the idea itself. ‘Fru’ and ‘Bana’ are derived from the phrase “Frutas de la Cuchabana”.
After starting his professional life in the world of consulting, he dared to be part of the initial Rappi team in which he had the task of opening the first operations outside of Bogotá, as well as in Mexico, Argentina, Uruguay and Brazil.
But being immersed in the day to day of the restaurants, he noticed that the lemons that arrived cost three times more than the price that came from his father’s farm. It was found that there was a row of intermediaries that did not add value and that, with technology, it could be corrected. And that this problem is repeated in all corners of Latin America.
For this reason, they have been able to open operations in Bogotá, Barranquilla, Mexico City and Sao Paulo, while they prepare to land in Guadalajara and their talent extends to Buenos Aires, where half of the technology team is based. Since 2018, when they started with 15 employees, the work team has multiplied by 100, since they are now a squad of more than 1,500 direct and indirect collaborators.
“One does not scale 1,500 times, but if you can bring better people so that the organization can scale,” says Fabián, to realize that his maturity as a founder has been identified by identifying the problems of the organization to know who is the person on the team or the one that is not yet on the team, to solve them. “One of the incentives we have is that a third of the employees are shareholders, that is why they are aligned in the thought that the company does well.”
This is how he tries to visit each country frequently to read the data and understand the people. Their offices are not in glass skyscrapers, they are warehouses full of baskets and forklifts. In its internal operation, Frubana buys the food and supplies, takes them to his warehouse and Amazon-style, makes the distribution. Technology enters to indicate the most profitable routes and to predict both consumption and production to avoid waste.
Daniella González Rubio, the human resources leader for the technology and product areas, considers that whoever has not visited the wineries to make the routes with the commercial team, does not understand what the company is. “We are risk takers, if the door is not built, we break the wall where there is none, that is our mentality, we always go big, beyond expectations,” he says. “It shows in the pride we feel every time we have a new winery.”
Frubana recently raised the total capital received from its investors since its inception to $ 102 million by securing $ 65 million in a Series B investment round led by Hans Tung, a partner at the venture capital firm. GGV Capital, with the participation of previous investors such as Tiger Global Management, Softbank and Monashees, and a new investor, Lightspeed Venture Capital.
Frubana “is about making sure that the distribution of food and products to restaurants is done in the most efficient way possible,” Tung told Forbes. “What’s interesting about this is that what they are supplying to restaurants could expand beyond food to more items over time. It is very interesting to see what Frubana can become ”.
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It was during the early days of the pandemic, when restaurants were plunged into a deep crisis, when Frubana made its transition from being a fruit and vegetable store, to one that sells everything.
“In traditional companies, companies iterate over years. We iterated in months, but now we iterate in days, ”says Gómez. “The pandemic forced us to have a shorter cycle of change.”
While small businesses were forced to go digital, the suppliers that sold to these types of companies wondered how to sell them digitally, which is why Frubana’s portfolio was made up of 60% of new categories.
As a result of this culture of daily creation, Frubana is piloting a restaurant financial services program, which could be fully implemented as early as the end of this year. A track of the journey that is just beginning.
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