Sorma Group celebrates its 50th birthday
Nevio Lotti with his wife Maria del Rosario Serrano and his daughter Silvia.
Cesena, May 2023 – Fruit and vegetable packaging worldwide has undergone profound changes and evolutions in the last half-century. Since 1973, Sorma group has played a leading role in these transformations, together with everyone who has contributed to its success: customers, suppliers, personnel and associates. In this spirit, at Macfrut the company celebrated its 50th birthday, with its friends, historic partners and the specialist press.
Relationships have been fundamental to Sorma Group’s growth ever since its launch in 1973. It was in that year that Nevio Lotti returned to Italy’s Romagna region after gaining business experience in Spain with engineering firm Roda, and founded Sorma.
Mr Lotti’s previous career had taught him the importance of the modern distribution system and its need for very precise quantity and quality standards from its producers. He realised that a balance had to be struck between the demands of producers and distributors, and that technological inno- vation was the way to reconcile the needs of the two sides. Sorma has pursued this aim ever since, and continues to do so today, with solutions that cover all fruit and vegetable post-harvesting pro- cessing phases.
Following his broad, open vision, Mr Lotti also travelled, took an interest in international relations, established relationships between production chain players, and went to take a look at what was happening in the trade beyond Italy’s borders. As a result, Sorma soon acquired an international structure with locations in France, Spain, Germany and the Netherlands and even outside Europe itself. Today the group has an impressive 10 production sites on four continents.
But what really distinguishes Sorma Group is its focus on the human aspect, a model that began with Nevio Lotti and has been retained unchanged for the last 50 years. “On this occasion, our thanks go to our founder and everyone who has made Sorma what it is today,” commented Andrea Mercadini, current CEO of the Group. “It’s easy to use the word group, but we really are one, and have been for 50 years. From employees who have now retired, who built the company, trained colleagues and installed machines in dozens of countries, to current staff, some of whom have been working for us for more than 35 years, and from suppliers to customers, people are our real added value, because what we do would be impossible without them.”
From 1973 to the present Sorma has designed and marketed more than 200 machine models and created more than 60 models of packaging, protected by 60 industrial patents developed by the Group’s various R&D centres, and it has production sites and dealers all over the world.
Sorma’s internationalisation is proceeding unchecked: in 2022 the Group opened a location in Lima, Peru, which is Sorma Iberica’s second subsidiary in South America, after the one established in Chile, and the Group’s seventeenth company. “The South American market is growing strongly, and we already have a large number of customers there,” stated Mario Mercadini, Marketing Manager of Sorma Group, “so opening another subsidiary was the obvious choice. In fact, our automatic pack- aging lines with optical grading are perfect for the most important local products, such as mangos and avocados, for which we actually have a specific sorter machine. Maintaining our usual working approach, we want to be close to our customers and partner them in building the best solutions for their needs.”
As it marks its fiftieth birthday, Sorma Group wishes to commemorate Nevio Lotti and his far-sighted vision, and to thank everyone whose work and commitment have enabled the company’s success so far.
Sorma Group was founded in 1973. It is currently the world’s only corporate group able to offer a turnkey solution com- prising the entire line of machines required to automatically grade, weigh and pack fruit and vegetable products, to- gether with supply of the technical material for creating all forms of packaging. It offers more than 160 automatic ma- chine models, protected by 60 patents entirely developed by an in-house team of 35 engineers. More than 30 fruit and vegetable products can be graded and presented with the utmost precision and reliability to effectively respond to the increasingly demanding needs of large-scale distribution. The Group has its own operations centres in Italy, Spain, Ger- many, France, Turkey, the Netherlands, the USA and Brazil. Alongside these subsidiaries, there are also 40 specialist distributors operating at the global level.
