Chapter one
Before I was born, my grandfather planted the first apple trees at El Torreón. Everything I do today starts with that decision, made on a farm in San Carlos that exported nothing yet.
Key milestone
1969
The company recognises 1969 as its founding year. There was no launch and no office: there was a farm in San Carlos, apple trees and a domestic market that paid little. My grandfather grew fruit for Chile for years before anyone thought of shipping it to another continent.
«I’m the third generation. My job isn’t to start something: it’s not to interrupt it.»
1970s
A decade of buying up neighbouring land, which set the scale we still work at today.
Context · 1980s
The first commercial plantings open an industry that thirty years later would be my farm’s core business. Neither my grandfather nor my father knew it at the time.
Chapter two
I was born far from the farm and grew up farther still: German school, design, brands, offices. For twenty years my job was explaining products other people made.
1983
27 October 1983. I studied at the German School in Valparaíso and then in Santiago: that left me with German and a fairly strict idea of order.
2002 — 2011
Design from 2002 to 2007; the Executive International MBA from 2009 to 2011, already working. That combination — project and balance sheet — is what I use every day on the farm.
2010 — 2011
We built TATT200, a collection with tattoo artists from Chile, Argentina, Brazil and Mexico, each designing from their own country, for the Latin American bicentenaries. La Tercera covered it in March 2011.
Key milestone
2011 — 2013
I lived in São Paulo, learned Portuguese on the job, and ran the region’s digital side at the exact moment advertising was moving to social media. In 2013, when Expansión asked me how to measure a campaign, I said what I still believe: what matters is the quality of the interaction, not the number of followers.
«I learned to build a brand before I had anything of my own that needed one.»
2013 — 2014
Globo Rojo was a platform for discovering and recommending content through social reputation. Alongside it I taught the eBranding diploma at the Santiago Chamber of Commerce. Neither made me rich; both taught me how to start from zero.
Chapter three
Coming back was not a career plan. It was an obligation that turned out to be the best thing that ever happened to me.
Key milestone
2015
My father died and the decision could not be postponed. In January 2015 I came in as general manager of El Torreón Export with an MBA, fourteen years of brand work behind me and not one full growing season to my name. That first year taught me that fruit doesn’t negotiate: it’s picked when it’s ready, cooled when it must be, and the market doesn’t wait for you to catch up.
«I went from selling an idea of sport to selling something that spoils if I get one week wrong.»
Context · 2015 — 2019
The presence of Lobesia botrana forces a treatment that breaks the cold chain and strips the fruit of its organic status. It’s the constraint that defined my first years in charge.
2016 — 2019
We stopped selling through third parties and started shipping ourselves. Every new market forced a change inside: sizing, packaging, cooling, paperwork.
Chapter four
The pandemic year was, for us, the year the company finally looked like what I wanted: a brand, a packhouse open to others, and a voice of our own in the industry.
Key milestone
2020
We renewed El Torreón’s identity starting from the volcanic trumao soils of the area, and opened our processing infrastructure to outside growers who wanted to use our chain and our export know-how to reach international markets. That was the moment the designer and the farmer stopped being two people.
«The brand came out of the ground we stand on. There was no need to look further.»
2020
In July we pushed a campaign to step up control of the pest across the region. In September I published a piece in PortalFrutícola on why orchards able to prove sound phytosanitary conditions should qualify for a Systems Approach instead of mandatory bromide.
Context · 2020
Southern fruit can arrive without fumigation if the orchard proves its condition. It changes the business for the whole area, not just for us.
Key milestone
2022
I commissioned Theon Design, in England, to fully rebuild a 964-generation Porsche 911. The project took years and reached Chile in December 2022. I had it painted violet in reference to the fruit that paid for it. I’m a member of Club Porsche Andino, and of all my cars this is the only one that is also an argument.
«A good season on the farm can be symbolised perfectly well by a new car.»
From my column “Para correrlos y admirarlos”, Mundoagro, April 2021
Context · 2023
Peruvian growth changes the calendar in which Chile competed unrivalled. Chilean acreage shrinks and switching varieties stops being optional.
2023
International logistics normalised after two impossible seasons. I said then what I still think: the problem is no longer the ship, it’s the exchange rate and the competition.
Chapter five
What comes next isn’t about planting more hectares. It’s about farm work no longer depending on there being enough hands available in January.
Key milestone
2025
In July we went to the Faculty of Engineering with the team. We toured digital fabrication, automation and robotics, and came away with an applied research and technology transfer project aimed at the least glamorous and most urgent thing we have: optimising transport and palletising inside the operation.
«Technology doesn’t enter the farm through the fruit: it enters through the pallet.»
2025
Migrant workers have become decisive for farming in Ñuble, especially after the labour shortage we’ve carried since 2021. In December we also took part in the coordination effort to secure formal contracts at peak harvest.
The story is still open. What happens each season, I write in the field notes.