SideRoads, Fall 2019

STRIVING to be the BEST AVIPECHICHAL grew from humble origins to become Ecuadors 1 egg producer G rowing up in the 1970s and 80s in the coastal province of Manabí Ecuador Eloy Intriago had big dreams of succeeding in business He embarked early in entrepreneurship by working as a shoe polisher At the age of 20 he took a job as a gas station attendant with his eye on learning the ropes so he could later take over the enterprise And thats exactly what he did just a few years later The gas station was not his only commercial endeavor He was also growing feed corn The good news was that his land was productive and there was a lot of potential for growth The bad news was that amid a faltering economy and limited infrastructure for effi ciently delivering goods around the region he was having trouble fi nding enough customers for all the corn he was raising So Intriago came up with a novel solution He would be his own customer I decided to become a poultry farmer because who eats corn Birds he says He built housing for 4000 laying hens in his backyard Over time Intriagos business expanded as he built on that original idea of being his own customer and service provider He bought silos for storing his corn and his own truck scale for weighing it By 1995 he was running a feed processing plant and had built a second 4 Fall 2019 www walinga com farm to breed laying hens in nearby Portoviejo He also bought another farm Rio de Oro River of Gold for breeding broilers Today Intriago owns fi ve automated broiler farms collectively known as Las Maravillas The Wonders In 2012 he consolidated these businesses under the trade name Avipechichal Based in Intriagos hometown of Junín Avipechichal is the top commercial producer of eggs in Ecuador and among the top fi ve broiler producers It sells 25000 trays of eggs each day and 10 million chickens a year Avipechichal has 300 employees Eloy Intriago and family on the payroll and contracts about 100 individuals as needed for maintenance and construction tasks and it further contributes to the Manabí economy by purchasing feed ingredients from local farmers Intriago