In 2000, the Engineer Juan A. Cipolina, betting on a life in the countryside, started up our business with Raft tomato brought from Spain grown on a sharecropping basis and the building of the first greenhouse.

The tomato plantation and part of the greenhouse were completely devastated by the heavy storm of August 23rd, 2005. There was no money to recover from the losses suffered, but far from abandoning we started a lettuce plantation, which has a shorter cycle than tomato, requires less investment and therefore, faster return.

Then, we went on with tomato and lettuce. Even though we had low production volume, we started trading our high-quality crop in a supermarket chain. Marcelo Cipolina joined the company, expanding trading to first-class hotels and restaurants - a quality demanding market. In a short time, we managed to consolidate the idea of our own farm which we could materialize in a 13-hectare land near La Colorada beach (Montevideo) where we started Chacra Bilu’s first plantations. With great effort we bought a tractor and several tools to start cleaning and preparing the land in order to start sowing. We designed the plots, planned the irrigation and built a wonderful 3.5 million liter dam. Our market is expanding in number of clients, variety of fruits and vegetables, in such a way that our own production is not enough. This is why we started working on a sharecropping basis with a producer from Salto, RG (Colonia Osimani Salto), with whom we also complemented the crop period. We also began to supply ourselves from Mercado Modelo (Main fruit and vegetable trading center in Uruguay).

We used to select, pack and condition our products in a small garage. In a constant product supply diversification process we ventured to produce IV Range products, i.e. prepared, ready-for-consumption products such as washed loose leaf and baby leaf mix lettuce. This year we started the production and sale of exotic products, such as green and yellow baby zucchini, baby carrot and baby bell pepper and 20 varieties of chili peppers.

In December 2008 we started supplying tourist cruises arriving at the country. This helped us improve goods packing and infrastructure. As pioneers in broccoli post-harvest and storage we managed to preserve it during summertime for at least 4 days.

We currently have state-of-the-art, 450 m2 facilities opposite Mercado Modelo, fully equipped with 2 cold-storage rooms, modified-atmosphere environments, H2O coolers, invoicing system and real-time stock control, 4 satellite-tracking vehicles and 8-ton delivery capacity daily. The above enables us to sell our produce to purchasers from Mercado Modelo, large areas, cruises, hotels and restaurants, keeping our quality in line with our beginnings.