His name was Manuel Silo da Graça Caetano, but he became known as “Mister Alfarroba”, for having dedicated almost his entire life to the processing industry of this product and its valorization. Manuel Caetano died on Saturday, March 16th, at the age of 87, but not without leaving a legacy that went beyond the borders of the Algarve.
Born in Bias do Sul (Moncarapacho), Manuel Caetano settled in Faro, where he worked since the age of 18 in the Alfarroba processing industry – first at Indal, which has since been acquired by the multinational Danisco, based in Denmark, and, more recently, at Industrial Farense.
More than working in the area of carob processing, he was a thinker and driver of innovation in the sector, but also one of the main defenders of this culture, which is now known as “the gold of the Algarve”, largely thanks to the work he developed.
«He was a very willful, hard-working and organized man, who always had a vision for the development of the Algarve», recalls José Graça, former deputy regional director of Agriculture and Fisheries and vice-president of Loulé Chamber, between 2001 and 2013.
In the 80s, when he was taking his first steps as a technician at DRAPAlg, José Graça joined Manuel Caetano and engineer Brito de Carvalho, also from the regional management, in promoting the radio program “The Algarve, the Sea and the Earth” , in RDP Algarve, where issues surrounding the carob sector were scrutinized.
«One of Manuel Caetano and Brito de Carvalho's passions was the development of new products and uses for carob. At the time, they talked about things that no one talked about», recalls José Graça.
As Manuel Caetano himself said, the innovative ideas that were transmitted on the radio program earned them the nickname “aluquinhos da caroroba”. “However, time proved them right.”
Manuel Caetano led, moreover, the development of a technology that, for years, was only used in the Indal factory, which allowed «to create cold-soluble locust bean gum, which was a great innovation for the ice cream industry, which in this In this way, they managed to save a lot of energy during production», explains José Graça.
After the relocation of Danisco's operations from Faro to Valencia, Manuel Caetano moved to Industrial Farense, at the time the only remaining carob processing factory - there was a third, Neves Pires, but it had already closed years ago -, where he was linked to the construction of a new and modern manufacturing unit in Areal Gordo.
The businessman in the dried fruit sector Vítor Neto also dealt closely with Manuel Caetano, at the Associação Empresarial Região do Algarve (NERA), with whom he maintained “a strong and positive connection” and whose opinion he “very valued”.
“I am very sorry about your disappearance. He was someone who had in-depth knowledge of the sector,” he says.
Manuel Caetano's funeral took place this Tuesday, the 19th, in Faro.
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