“Instead of making $10, it’s better to make $5, but spend time with your family.” This is the advice that Pedro Pablo Martinetti Navas, the patriarch of the Martinetti family, always gives to his family. Today, as every year, he will soon turn 91, the founder of Casa del Cacao and the initiator of the cocoa tree history of this Quevedo family meets with his children and grandchildren to celebrate Father’s Day.

Don Pedro started his work in Quevedo, his son Gonzalo Enrique Martinetti Saltos, 60, started his company in Buena Fe, and his grandson Pedro Gonzalo Martinetti Macías, 34, founded his in Babahoy. Lessons of life and work are passed down from generation to generation between the smell and taste of the cocoa tree.

With his toquilla straw hat, cane and smile that exudes peace and serenity, the head of the Martinetti family, along with his successors in the business, recalls working from a young age and even living in poverty with his mother after his parents left. separated. He worked in construction and later opened his grocery store in Quevedo, in the province of Los Ríos. As a businessman, he retired after completing 68 years of work.

He earned his first sucres by renting magazines, now he invests millions of dollars in factories for the processing of Ecuadorian cocoa beans that he exports

Among the memories of his first steps in business, Martinetti pauses, raises his voice, which at some point seems to burst with emotion, and says: “My mother taught me to be honest, that is of great value to everyone, honesty is the most precious thing”, while Pedro Gonzalo listens very attentively .

He doesn’t say it as a platitude, but because he applied it throughout his life, and as proof he told an anecdote: “There was a fire, my business burned down, I went out with my daughter in my arms and when I looked, everything was destroyed, everything was wooden. I had 100,000 sucres and people told me: ‘Pedro, don’t pay anyone, how much will you have left if you pay everyone, you will only have 8,000 sucres left, don’t pay, you pay later, everyone will suffer'”, they advised.

But Don Pedro paid what he had to pay and kept 8,000 sucres, the country’s currency before dollarization in 2000 when 25,000 sucres became 1 dollar. “When I started, I started with 3,000 borrowed sucres, when the fire happened I was left with my 8,000 sucres, that was already a profit and I was no longer indebted to anyone, with those I started again,” he says proudly. He says that when his creditors came to him and told him that they were sorry that he had lost everything due to the fire and offered him new loans, he was already waiting for them with a check in hand to pay them off.

His honesty paid off for the founder of the Martinetta dynasty. His business took off again and his credibility grew exponentially. “Go to Martinetta, everything is there and it’s fair,” was the advice that every uninformed customer received in Quevedo at the time. Martinetti also bought coffee, cotton and other products, but decided to specialize in cocoa, the rest is history, a story that led them to be the first exporter of cocoa in the country for several years.

His son Gonzalo Enrique remembers seeing his father working in the business, although it was much later, when he was 10 years old. “He had a wholesale and retail business, he sold everything, wholesale and retail, only he didn’t sell meat or vegetables,” says the son who inherited the business from his father.

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There were goats parked outside his father’s business that brought the products that Don Pedro bought, and with the money that Martinetti paid them, the suppliers became customers and bought other products in the same business. “He bought cocoa and sold them other things himself, because he sold everything,” recalls Gonzalo Martinetti, who already started doing business at that age. “He put a number on the bags with some cardboard, took care of the bag, gave them a ticket and charged them forty cents sucre per bag,” laughs Martinetti Jr., who still remembers taking care of between 40 and 70 bags and earning more of 32 sucres per day.

Later, at the age of 20, when he fully entered the cocoa business, he remembers that it was hard work, for example, they had to drive ten or fifteen trucks to dry cocoa in Manto because of the lack of sun in Quevedo. Then there was a change of name and location, they moved 2.5 km up the road towards Valencia, where they built Casa del Cacao. “This is starting to be a different story. It was no longer a grocery store, it was a cocoa trading and export company,” says Pedro Gonzalo -Martinetti’s grandson-, who takes his father’s word for it.

He too has memories of his father and grandfather, but of Don Pedro more from the stage when he was already retired. His first memories are of ‘surfing’ in the cocoa tree. “When I was 8 years old, I remember the big cocoa mountains that were formed at that time and I saw them and I love to surf, and you could say that the first wave I surfed was the cocoa mountain, I remember having a table of plywood and I would place myself on the top of the mountain and I would descend it all the way”, laughs the grandson of Pedro Martinetti Navas, who later also made his way in the industry.

Grandfather, son and grandson tell the story of the Martinettis, a family with the taste of cocoa

“My father, before inheriting the business from his grandfather, started his own company in Buena Fe, I also wanted to create my own legacy, I finished university and went to work in the family business, in Casa del Cacao, I learned the Business and when it was already soaked with everything, I told my mom that I wanted to become independent and I found Babahoyo Plaza”, says the grandson who founded his own company Babahoyo Export in 2016, which is now a strategic ally of Casa del Cacao.

The stories the Martinettis tell each other, as if hearing them for the first time, continue to be flavored with cocoa and are retold today on Father’s Day. “Cocoa brings us together, it’s something we’re passionate about, something we always sit down to talk about,” they point out with joy and pride.