Opera. THE pear! is ready. In stores in October

It’s called Opera sca and it is the newly founded Italian cooperative for pear production.

The idea to unite under a single brand (Opera. La pera!) the leading sector producers was conceived by ApoConerpo – an organisation of Italian agricultural produce farmers in the province of Bologna (670 million of turnover in 2014) – who then suggested to Luca Granata, former General Manager of Melinda, to develop it.

The new General Manager of Opera decided on Bologna as the operational headquarters and the companies in the Italian region of Emilia-Romagna as the pillars for building a success comparable to that of the apples of the Val di Non area.

The aim of the project, which unites more than one thousand producers — organised in 18 large companies for a cultivated surface area of 7,500 hectares… — is to reduce competition between companies involved and increase the sales of the fourth favourite fruit of Italian consumers through the concentration of the management and product supply.

For now, we are still working on our pilot programme, and a few weeks after the first harvest of 2015, the companies that make up the skeleton of the cooperative are preparing machinery and workers to receive the nearly 200 thousand tonnes of product expected for this year. To see the first pear with the Opera brand name in produce stores, consumers will have to wait until early October, when distribution throughout Italy is expected to start.