The Former Tupperware Factory in Constância Goes Unsold Again After a Lone Bid Two Thirds Below Its 10 Million Euro Price
An in-person auction of the Montalvo plant, closed since January 2025, drew one offer and was suspended. It is the second failed sale this year, and about 200 former workers are still waiting to be paid in full.
The former Tupperware factory in Montalvo, in the municipality of Constância (Santarém district), is still without a buyer. An in-person auction on Wednesday 14 October, with a starting price of 10 million euros, drew a single offer roughly two thirds below that figure, and the sale was suspended, Jornal de Negócios reported. The newspaper said the price is expected to be cut so the plant can go back on the market at a more attractive level.
It is the second failed attempt this year. In April, a sealed-bid sale run by KPMG closed with no offer reaching the 10 million euro minimum, the insolvency administrator, Jorge Calvete, told Lusa, adding that the search for a buyer would continue.
How the plant closed
The factory had made Tupperware products in Montalvo since 1980. Its owner, Tupperware Indústria Lusitana de Artigos Domésticos, was 74 percent held by Tupperware Portugal and 26 percent by Tupperware Iberia, both wholly owned by the US parent, Tupperware Brands Corporation, Lusa reported. The parent went bankrupt in September 2024 and was sold, and the brand's production and sales licences in Portugal were withdrawn.
The plant stopped producing on 8 January 2025, and the Lisbon district court declared the company insolvent on 10 February 2025. Three days later about 200 workers received their dismissal letters. At its peak the factory employed about 260 people.
What was on offer
The auction catalogue published by the auctioneer, Avalibérica, lists the case as number 3746/25.7T8LSB-A at the Lisbon Commercial Court (Juízo de Comércio de Lisboa). It set out three stages:
- the whole plant for 10 million euros, with the sale exempt from property transfer tax (IMT), stamp duty and VAT under the insolvency code;
- if that failed, the buildings for 5.456 million euros and the machinery and other movable assets for 4.544 million euros;
- and finally a sale lot by lot.
The property is a three-building industrial complex with 16,477.7 square metres of floor space on a 42,514 square metre plot, plus a separate 3,520 square metre rural plot. The movable assets run to 198 lots, led by Engel plastic injection-moulding machines built between 1993 and 2011, alongside electrical transformers, handling equipment, office furniture and a 2008 Audi.
Under the auction rules, bids below the base price can be registered, must be backed by a deposit and stay binding for 60 days, but the administrator may refuse to accept them. Valuations given to Lusa in October 2025 put the whole complex at 8.59 million euros.
What it means for the former workers
The dismissed workers are the largest creditors in the case. In October 2025 the chair of the creditors' committee, the lawyer Paulo Valério, told Lusa that 9.074 million euros was owed to them, out of 11.47 million euros of recognised debts, and that about a third of the amount owed to the workers had already been paid by the Fundo de Garantia Salarial (Wage Guarantee Fund), the state fund that covers part of the wages and compensation an insolvent employer cannot pay. The rest depends on what the assets fetch. The administrator was also trying to recover more than 15 million euros owed by Tupperware group companies in Ireland and Switzerland, Valério said.
A buyer would not automatically be able to make Tupperware products again: that would need a licence from the brand's owners, which the insolvent estate does not hold. No new auction date has been announced. The case is one of several industrial insolvencies in the news this autumn, alongside a car-parts foundry in Oliveira de Azeméis that laid off all 318 workers; declared insolvencies nationally were up 5.1 percent in the first eight months of the year.
