Jerónimo Martins Rolls Out the Cultivar National-Supplier Programme at the Feira Nacional da Agricultura — 115 Pingo Doce Fruit-and-Veg Partners, 315,000 Tonnes in 2025 Purchases and a Three-Pillar Innovation, Optimisation and ESG-Audit Stack

Jerónimo Martins, the Lisbon-listed retail group that owns the Pingo Doce supermarket chain, has launched a new producer-and-supplier programme called Cultivar, presented during the Feira Nacional da Agricultura (National Agriculture Fair) in Santarém. The initiative bundles together technical training, sustainability audits and a community-engagement strand under a single umbrella, and is designed to anchor the group's long-running shift toward domestic sourcing for fresh produce.

Cultivar is built on three pillars, as the programme coordinators explained to ECO: innovation in agriculture, business optimisation and community proximity. Practical actions span technical training sessions, courses on good production practices, modules on natural-resource use and climate-change adaptation, and incentives for joint projects on innovation and sustainability. "This involves a substantial increase in collaboration with partners and the promotion of more efficient, resilient agriculture prepared for the challenges ahead. With this approach we aim to generate value along the whole chain, translating into freshness, flavour, innovation, differentiation and transparency in our processes and products," said Sara Domingos, manager of innovation and supplier development at Jerónimo Martins and Cultivar's coordinator.

The numbers behind the programme set the stakes. Pingo Doce already works with 115 Portuguese suppliers in the fruit-and-vegetable segment, and roughly 95% of horticultural purchases come from domestic producers. In 2025 those national purchases totalled around 315,000 tonnes. Across the wider Pingo Doce supply chain, 80% of total purchases are sourced inside Portugal. The group, led by Pedro Soares dos Santos, did not disclose the investment attached to the Cultivar rollout.

The technical-training strand will run through specialist workshops and demonstration sessions "that lead to the incorporation of innovation in agriculture", quality-programme lead Susana Fernandes told ECO. Calendar dates for the first round of sessions for cooperatives and firms have not yet been set. A second strand will measure a defined set of ESG criteria across partner suppliers — Jerónimo Martins describes the goal as identifying gaps on social and environmental indicators and building a diagnostic matrix that informs both supplier development and future purchasing decisions.

The community-proximity pillar layers in biodiversity-preservation projects and food-waste reduction. "Another example of action under this pillar will focus on reducing food waste, both by redirecting surpluses and through new circular-economy projects," Fernandes added. The framing aligns with Jerónimo Martins's broader sustainability disclosures, which already report progress on the same indicator basket the EU Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive requires of large listed groups from financial year 2025.

The choice of the Feira Nacional da Agricultura as the launch venue is deliberate. The fair, held in Santarém since 1954, is the main commercial meeting point between Portuguese primary-production cooperatives and the country's large food buyers, and remains the venue where the Confederação dos Agricultores de Portugal (Portuguese Farmers' Confederation — CAP) traditionally negotiates the year's headline supply-chain themes. Pingo Doce's pitch — formalised partnership, calendarised training, ESG diagnostics and longer-horizon contracts with anticipated payments and delivery flexibility — directly addresses the cash-flow and predictability complaints that CAP has voiced in successive editions of the fair.

For consumers, Cultivar is unlikely to change shelf prices in the short run, but it does reinforce a sourcing structure that has already let Pingo Doce hold its national-supplier share well above the sector average. For the group's competitors — Continente (Sonae), Lidl Portugal, Auchan and Mercadona's domestic operation — the launch resets the benchmark on producer-engagement programmes, an area where each chain has previously made narrower commitments without a unified, named framework of this scale.