A Ponte de Lima Food Group Puts €5.2 Million Into Its Factory to Push the Chipicão Snack Brand Into Spain

A family-owned food producer in the north of Portugal is betting on its own balance sheet — rather than European subsidies — to fund an expansion and take one of its brands across the border into Spain. Officetotal Food Brands, which runs the Saborosa bakery operation in Ponte de Lima, in the northern Minho region, is investing €5.2 million to enlarge its industrial site and lift production capacity, and says the project carries "0% community subsidies" — no EU grant money at all.

The centrepiece of the strategy is Chipicão, a packaged pastry-and-snack brand the company bought from the American giant PepsiCo around nine months ago. That acquisition handed Officetotal the rights to the brand across Portugal, Spain and France, and the firm is now moving to activate the second of those markets, rolling Chipicão out to Spanish consumers as the anchor of its cross-border push.

For a mid-sized producer, buying an established brand from a multinational and then bankrolling the growth without public money is an unusually assertive play. Diogo Freitas, chief executive of Officetotal Food Brands and part of the Freitas family that owns the group, has framed the expansion as a vote of confidence in the company's ability to compete on its own terms in the crowded Iberian snack market, where private-label products and multinational brands dominate supermarket shelves.

The Ponte de Lima investment is aimed squarely at giving the company the industrial muscle to supply two countries — and eventually three — from a single northern-Portuguese base. Alongside Chipicão, the group already produces Belgian-style wafers, part of a portfolio built around baked and packaged sweet goods with long shelf lives suited to export.

The move fits a broader pattern in Portugal's food-and-drink sector, where several family groups have used acquisitions and self-funded expansions to scale up and chase the far larger Spanish market rather than stay confined to a small domestic base. Spain has roughly four times Portugal's population and sits right next door, making it the natural first step for any Portuguese consumer brand with ambitions beyond its home shelves.

The company has not disclosed how many jobs the expansion will create or by how much it will raise output, and the detailed figures behind the project remain thin. But the headline is clear enough: a Minho bakery is putting €5.2 million of its own money behind a PepsiCo cast-off, and wagering that it can turn Chipicão into a brand that sells on both sides of the Portuguese-Spanish frontier.