Making gold with Házi Piros

Házi Piros Kft., one of the key companies on the spice and seasoning market, is twenty years old. Commercial director Gábor Heltai answered our magazine’s questions.
What were the most important stages of development in the past 20 years?
– In 1990, József Németh, the owner of Házi Piros founded a paprika processing plant in Sükösd. Ground paprika still represent one third of our sales. After a while started dealing with spices and spice mixes under the brand name Házi Arany.

Házi Piros has been trying to integrate paprika growers for years. How did the crisis affect this incentive?
– Unfortunately paprika is one of the least supported agricultural plants grown in Hungary, so many growers switch to other plants. In the past 10 years, paprika growing land was reduced to one third.
– There are favourable trends too: demand is growing for safe Hungarian products. – We are really happy about this. The more so, because we were one of the 13 FMCG companies who founded the Hungarian Product Kht. in 2006. It is very important to differentiate our products with the Hungarian Product Trademark.
– It is not easy to tell to what extent patriotism influences shopping decisions.
For Házi Piros’ 20th birthday all our spice mixes will receive a new, livelier packaging design; each packaging will bear the marking mentioned above, so perhaps in future sales data we will be able to see the influence of the Hungarian Product Trademark.

What are Házi Piros Kft.’s pans for the future?
– Brand building costs a lot of money. We are still not an ‘A’ brand, but we offer one of the best price/value ratios. This is why we were able to increase sales last year: our sales revenue was HUF 2.6 billion. Our goal is to keep our market position.