CEO for Alpina attends town meeting while site plan is approved

It's not often that the CEO of a multinational corporation drops in on a Town of Batavia Planning Board meeting, but Alpina Product's Julian Jaramillo just happened to be in town today.

Jaramillo (above, left), lives in Colombia, but as he guides his company toward its first expansion into the United States, he needs to visit the area where he hopes to soon employ more than 50 people.

He said he is very excited about the opportunity for Alpina in Western New York.

"We've gotten great support," Jaramillo said. "This is a huge opportunity. It is our future and success in this country is important to the growth of our company."

Based in Bogata, Alpina is a food processing company that specializes in dairy products.

Early reports about Alpina's expansion focused on the opportunity for the company to market its products to the growing Hispanic population in the Northeast. But Jaramillo shook his head and said no when asked if that was the marketing plan for the company's new yogurt product.

Managing Director Carlos Ramirez Zavarce (above, right) jumped in and said the company's goals go far beyond a niche market.

"To be honest, we can leverage our brand to create cash flow by selling to Hispanics, but when we did our research three years ago, we found we could have the confidence to go mainstream," Ramirez said. "Instead of fighting for small pieces of the pie by creating a niche market, we're going after a mainstream market."

The company is planning to go big in the U.S., Ramirez explained through what he called an "insurgent" strategy.

Currently, two companies, Yoplait and Dannon, control 80 percent of the yogurt market. To compete, Alpina must offer a product that is different enough from the established brands to find new customers.

To that end, Alpina hired a New York-based chef with an expertise in health and wellness recipes to come up with new yogurt products for Alpina.

It is those new products that will be made and distributed from the Batavia plant.

"They're (Yoplait and Dannon) are great, they’re big and they're awesome, but it's (all the) same stuff, same models," Ramirez said. "If you look at a company like Chobani Greek Yogurt, they started three or five years ago and they do things differently. That’s what I mean by insurgent. Insurgent is just a way of thinking. Do things differently, not just from a marketing perspective, but from the products you launch."

If the strategy is successful, Alpina sees expanding beyond just New York, Toronto and the Tri-State market, and going into the South and then nationwide.

The expansion would mean adding additional refrigerated storage to the Batavia plant.

The plant as initially constructed is expected to be 40,000 sq. ft., expandable to 120,000 sq. ft.  

The site plan was presented to the Town of Batavia Planning Board on Tuesday evening and the plan was approved by a vote of 6-0.

Alpina hopes to complete its purchase of the 10-acre parcel in the Genesee Valley Agri-Business Park by Aug. 15 and break ground immediately.

The goal is to get the structure built before winter sets in and then take care of interior construction during the cold months. If all goes according to plan, the company can start gearing up for production in May with the first product shipments in June.

Ramirez said Alpina picked Batavia (over the other finalist, Scranton) because: there is easy access to both raw product and shipment of finished product; there is a local labor pool with expertise in dairy products; the great people the company worked with at GCEDC; generous tax abatements; the close proximity to Cornell University and RIT; the two million people between Rochester and Buffalo as well as being centrally located to the markets Alpina wants to target first.

There is a great market to pursue here, Ramirez told the board.

"You see companies trying to go national at some point, but there is a narrow market we can pursue here and just concentrate on here for a few years and become profitable."

For our previous coverage of Alpina, click here.

UPDATE: WBTA's Geoff Redick produced a video about Tuesday's meeting.