Company and Fruit Industry News

iTi Tropicals & Quicornac celebrating 25 years in business

In November iTi Tropicals Inc took a day off and celebrated it's 25th anniversary in Princeton, NJ with a day of fun activities including archery, falconry and of course with a special dinner integrating all the ingredients the company sells. Why archery and falconry? " Well" , says Gert van Manen , President and founder of iTi, " as traders we are explorers , we travel the world and bring back new, exotic, exciting things to the new world like games, furniture and yes fruit juice. That's the connection". He continues " we tried to accomplish this in our look and feel at the office as well. A building design inspired by 17th century Amsterdam canal house and yes even the essence of our business is built on bringing exciting and exotic products to this country so doing something unusual on this day is fitting". We have come a long way from when we started over 25 years ago and the USA was basically solely consuming apple and orange juice. In 1988 there was no demand for mango, passion fruit, let alone coconut water.

A few months later van Manen is in Guayaquil, Ecuador to help celebrate Quicornac's anniversary. "Sustainability starts with loyalty and Quicornac is a perfect example of this" . We started doing business with Quicornac 24 years ago and never looked back! In his speech van Manen thanked the people of Ecuador. iTi has been doing business in Ecuador for 25 years with InBorja, Agroficial and Quicornac. The country and the people have been very good to iTi . He of course also put the spotlight on Mr. Bernhard Frei , CEO of Quicornac. A true friend and a leader in both his surroundings and his industry according to van Manen. The market for passion fruit has grown tremendously under Bernhard's leadership and now with locations in both Peru and Ecuador we can face the continued demand for this very unique and flavorful fruit juice concentrate.