The Luengo lineage: from a mill to kings of legumes

In 1921, it was common to see Gaspar Luengo Fernández strolling through the endless open spaces surrounding La Bañeza, a small agricultural town in Castile and León. He was a resident of the town and ran a flaxseed mill and a granary. He had also planted various chickpeas, beans, and lentils: pulses were one of the most characteristic crops of the area, along with potatoes, beets, and cereals. Today, more than a hundred years later, the family name has pride of place on the shelves of canned food in supermarkets.

With a turnover of €108.5 million in 2023, Luengo is the leading company in the pulse sector in Spain. In terms of turnover, only the Cidacos group, which generates around €500 million each year thanks to its agreements with Mercadona, is ahead of it. However, only 27% of this revenue comes from pulses. Be that as it may, how has the Luengo family managed to turn their mill into one of the key business players in the sector?

The company's growth cannot be explained without understanding how the pulse market has flourished in Spain. Over the last fifteen years, consumption has hovered around three kilos per person, according to the latest data from the Spanish Pulse Association. Its reports also place Catalonia as the third most consumed territory in the state and rank the most consumed pulses: chickpeas (1.4 kg/per capita), lentils (0.92), and white beans (0.9). However, the current figures for the sector bear no resemblance to those of Luengo's early days. When Gaspar worked at his mill in La Bañeza, the production and consumption of these foods were essentially local. It wasn't until the 1970s that everything changed.

At that time, legume consumption had declined: while they had previously been a very common food item on our plates—especially during lean times—the rise in purchasing power and new culinary trends arriving from other countries were gradually pushing them to the sidelines. Luengo saw this as an opportunity. "After decades of selling our dried legumes, in the 1980s we launched canned cooked legumes onto the market," the company recalls. This format revolutionized the sector. In a society where there was increasingly less time to cook, Luengo's canned legumes made it easier to reincorporate legumes into the daily diet, especially among families with less time to cook.

The Luengo boom

The Luengo business was passed down from generation to generation until Gaspar Luengo Asensio took over the reins in the mid-1990s. The business's turnover skyrocketed: if in 1995 it was around €12 million, by 2017 it had already exceeded €60 million. This growth is partly explained by the acquisition of several companies in the sector.

It was one of its main competitors. In 2012, it reached a turnover of €60 million, but by 2015, it had entered into bankruptcy proceedings. production capacity," the executive continues.

Since then, and now with the fourth generation at the helm, the company has its headquarters and much of the packaging logistics in a large 18,000 square meter warehouse in the León municipality of Riego de la Vega, next to the national highway. keeping the company in good shape, despite the passing of the years: from the Luengo Origen range –with designation of origin–, to dried and cooked pulses from organic farming, passing through products widely used by vegetarians or vegans, such as textured soy Meanwhile, a few kilometers further south, the La Bañ center of one of the old Luengo facilities, which became too small for them.