Chile is seen as market entry area for South America for many branches already

As Santiago is the biggest business city in Chile I got in contact with Antje Wandelt – Director of DEInternational at the German Chamber of commerce (AHK) there.

It was very interesting for me to compare Argentina and Chile with each other. Countries always appear quite similar if you look at them from a distant perspective but once you get more into the details – quite a lot of differences appear.

As any other chamber of commerce they act as a contact point for German companies mainly in terms of providing business information and contacts in Chile, branch specific information and possibilities to enter a new market and set up a business successfully.

Chamber of commerce - Website use and Internet spread

The chamber itself is working with two main websites, www.deinternational.de and www.camchal.cl. The DEinternational website is set up as an own brand for standardized business center communication for different countries. The camchal website is more targeted towards providing current news around the countries, branches and regions as well as informing them about upcoming projects and results of past projects. As 3^rd option the Chilenian chamber takes part in a B2B renewable energy platform where companies can provide their own services in this sector to be found by others – it has similarities to the yellow page entry in Germany.

Internet as an important future channel for a charity project in Paraguay

Have you ever visited a very poor country and afterwards started to think about helping the people there somehow – not only with money –  far more with the kind of basic education and mechanics that is needed to set up their own life successfully?
I met a young women from Michigan who followed exactly these roads. I found her story very interesting and touching. If this wasn’t reason enough to ask her for an interview, Internet use is a necessity in her project, to communicate and seek out future sales channels.

During her university study 3 years ago she had the opportunity to take part in a global perspectives and service exchange program in Nicaragua. During her stay there she visited a garbage dump where thousands of people were living. Unable to do much at the time, she went home thinking about how after graduation she could serve people living in similar places in South America. She contacted a school in the capital of Paraguay, Asuncion that educated children living in the dump.  Tarah spent 4 months there teaching English to first graders, and through this she was able to meet the women in the children’s lives, mothers, aunts, and grandmothers. 

Did you ever think about how walnuts get into your bag in the supermarket?

I never before spent a second thinking about this topic while enjoying the lovely taste. While travelling through Chile I got the chance to spent a couple of days in a family house in the beautiful countryside area of Los Andes / San Felipe. It is situated in the middle of the Anden, a very sunny area which is famous for all kind of agricultural products - especially wine, walnuts and a lot of other vegetables and fruits. 

 

During my stay there I even visited and worked (!) in a walnut cracking fabric which was very interesting to see and to experience especially because you get a bit of an insight the life of the worker.

The fabric itself is a pure B2B company which has no direct contact to the final customer at all. It has around 100 employees who spend their day almost exclusively cracking and sorting walnuts. The walnuts are delivered in huge bags. As you can see in the pictures mainly women of all age levels are part of this team. The cracking and sorting itself is not that complicated, but in combination with assembly-line work, the noises of hammers and the pain in your hands it is a bit stressful after a while. (at least I got this impression).

Men carry the heavy walnut bags to where the women are working. The process of quality control is really strict. Everyone has to wear special clothes which cover almost the whole body. Finishing one big bag per day is set as a kind of general target for all workers.

The walnuts are sorted mainly by colour because this is more or less an indication of the quality of the taste and therefore also for the path they will follow for further processing. A special team is responsible to check the quality of all collections before it is prepared for delivering to companies who set up their orders.

I was unfortunately not allowed to take a lot of pictures so I can only provide a few impressions.

But of course I was not only interested in tasting the different flavours of walnuts - I also wanted to know if companies like this use the internet as a means of communication or as a selling channel at all. My initial assumption was right. So far internet does not play a role and the communication to their B2B customers is mainly via phone or personal contact. The walnuts are delivered in huge boxes to many countries around the globe with trucks, ships and even planes if necessary. Within a couple of days the produce arrives at the B2B customer for further processing. 

I got the chance to speak to the director of this company. Unfortunately my Spanish is "under development" and he and his team spoke no English at all. Therefore some information was inevitably lost in translation, This information would have contributed to the research I am doing here in South America.

Anyway - I doubt that we have similar factories in Germany so it was a good way to get an "insider view of the walnut bag" I buy in the supermarket on a regular basis :-)

Do you want to see a few more impressions? Then follow the link to the webalbum