Artichoke

• We are the biggest Artichokes growers.
• Our mechanized packing plant is located in the middle of the only area in Egypt producing Artichokes.
• We export Artichokes only from farms and contracted farmers to insure purity of the variety, highest quality and guarantee freshness.
• Early crop in November is only available from our packing plant.
• Within 1 hour from packing time, the Artichokes are transported, sorted, sized and packed on our packing line and put in our pre-cooling facilities
• Our fresh Artichokes for export are characterized by their freshness, long shelf life and highest quality.

The variety grown in our farms as well as all Egypt is the voilet Artichoke which is originated from Southern France region of Var nearby Cavaillon. This is a precious variety which is known for its superb taste and aroma and tenderness. This Artichoke variety is characterized by two external aspects:

• The violet color over the green leaves.
• The shape of the fruit bottom is conical.

In our farms, we constantly introduce newtechnologies with the help of specialized laboratories and qualified scientists and agronomists.
Every year, in our experimental growing area we thrive for achieving the following targets:

• New selected Artichokes plants which give bigger production and better quality.
• Growning techniques that give earlier crops.
• New planting techniques starting from shoots, seeds and tissue culture.
• Preservation of the characteristics of the precious violet Artichokes.

Picking Artichokes

The fully grown Artichoke plant is about 120 cm high with a lot of big leaves of about 100 cm long each. One plant could carry up to 5 piece with different sizes at the same time. When a piece is picked, more will come. Depending on the packing orders, the piece with adequate size are picked. Smaller piece are left on the plant to be picked later when they reach the desired size. The Artichokes are carefully picked from the farms with along with some fresh plant leaves. This insures the freshness of the Artichokes during transportation.

Packing plant

We have a state of the art custom built packing plant for Artichokes.

It consists of the following stages:

• Cutting stems
• Storing
• Sizing
• Packing
• Palletizing
• Pre-cooling
• Refrigerated storage

All this has to be done within 1 hour from the picking time. The following are the details of the main steps of packing.

Sorting

This stage is done on special conveyors for inspection of the piece quality. Lower grade piece are sorted out and go to our processing plant.