We are a family from Cullera (Valencia) who have orange and mandarin orchards.

I am Ruth Palomero, a pharmacy graduate. In 2011 I decided, together with Ximo, my husband, to start selling our crops on the Internet in order to become self-employed and try to get a fairer price for our oranges, and in this way be able to keep our orchard in production.

Our orchard is located in the municipality of Cullera, in Valencia, in the privileged natural environment of the "Parc Natural de l'Albufera". We have inherited my father-in-law Joaquín's love for our garden and we have taken over from him. Unlike him, who depended on intermediaries to sell his crops, we are able to sell them directly from our website. Ximo, my husband, who has inherited his father's enthusiasm for growing oranges, is currently in charge, now with the challenge of doing it organically. In our clemenvilla orchard we are now helped by Kike, a man of the countryside who loves his work. Every year our trees get bigger and more beautiful. Uncle Tomàs has also helped us a lot and continues to do so by taking care of his clementines and lane-late for our shop.

We now also sell the crops of other local farmers. We have also incorporated the sale of organic products into our shop and we are pleased to see how sales of these products increase each season compared to conventional products.

With our proposal, we make it possible for our customers to enjoy, just like our family, the best oranges with all the properties of freshly picked fruit, oranges that ripen on the tree, not in cold stores or warehouses and that we promise to deliver to your home in the shortest possible time.

We have a great team in the office, in the warehouse and in the orchard.

Esther does many different tasks; among them, she is in direct contact with the clients by e-mail, with great kindness and patience. Vicent, the computer scientist, makes this small company have a web site and a first class computer and traceability system, which we always say is a "Ferrari". He also does important co-managerial tasks, being a great support in decision making. We also have Gisela and Jocelyne as translators for German and French.

And I am in charge of coordinating the team that we form and together we try to ensure that everything runs smoothly day by day.

... Oh, and my girls, now two women, unconditional fans of our juice and critics of the quality of the product.

Traditionally, the Valencian Country has been one of the main producers and exporters of oranges to Europe since the beginning of the 20th century. The quality of our soils and the mildness of our climate make it a privileged territory for the cultivation of oranges. Our town, Cullera, located at the mouth of the river Xúquer, like others in our land, has all the conditions to produce oranges of the highest quality.

Until the 1970s, Cullera was almost exclusively agricultural, with oranges and rice being the most widespread crops. Due to various factors, it has been several decades since orange growing ceased to be profitable for small Valencian producers, becoming, in most cases, ruinous due to low market prices. Although it has been decreasing little by little, even today, a large part of our municipality is still dedicated to the orange harvest. The land has been inherited from parents to children, often being divided in the process, so that many families in Cullera have a piece of farmland of generally small size, with little or no profitability, which they continue to look after.

Our family has been cultivating its own orchards for more than three generations, selling oranges to the traditional trade. With the expansion of new technologies, in 2012, we decided to sell our oranges over the Internet, and deliver them directly to the consumer. Thanks to the good acceptance among our customers, in recent seasons we have been able to sell, in addition to our own, the harvest of other small local producers, almost all of them family and friends, paying them between 40% and 100% more than the market price. We were also able to provide decent working conditions for our workers at a critical time for many of them given the current crisis situation, in particular the very high unemployment rate.

And within this local and regional context we intend to take our business forward. Taking advantage of the new ways of understanding global trade, which allow us to establish a direct link between producers and consumers, we contribute to an improvement in the quality of life of those closest to us, while at the same time offering our customers the possibility of accessing a natural, fresh and quality product.