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Selva Nevada

Selva Nevada is a company that rescues the biodiversity of the Colombian rainforest through the commercialization of ice cream, milkshakes, and pulps of Amazonian and tropical fruits. The company was created by the brothers Catalina and Alejandro Álvarez and their partners, Antonuela Ariza and Mario Fernando Rojas, as an idea to take advantage of previous experiences that the Álvarez brothers had acquired in their personal and professional lives. The trips to remote territories in which the brothers accompanied their father in his work as a geographer, in addition to their time in the public sector in international cooperation work for rural development, allowed them to get to know a good part of the regions and rural productive associations, identifying the main challenges and opportunities they had with their products.

In 2000, the first contacts were made with associations that were unable to market their products because of the precariousness of the roads and buyers, or because they were in the midst of the dynamics of the armed conflict. The partners identified the market need for rural fruit pulp enterprises and began marketing initially with restaurants in Bogotá. Seven years later, in 2007, Antonuela Ariza, a partner in the initiative and chef at the Mini-mal restaurant, suggested the idea of experimenting in the creation of products such as ice cream and milkshakes based on the fruit pulp produced by the communities. From that moment on, they stopped being exclusively commercializers of fruit pulp and legally constituted as Selva Nevada, having a commercial line of pulp, but also an offer in derived products such as ice cream, milkshakes and others that were commercialized in three physical points of sale located in Bogotá.

Catalina
Álvarez

“Many people end up in war because they have no other motivation or dream to fulfill, when one creates and builds a company from these fruits what the communities want is for there to be peace so that this can be maintained”

Today, they have four work areas: a production area, located in the AETCR and in charge of making the products; a marketing area, located in Medellín and responsible for product distribution and customer service; an administration area for the workshop; and finally, the management area, which plays the role of managing and interacting with different actors.

Confecciones La Montaña has managed to position itself as a national reference in the field of business for peace, so much so that with the support of Inexmoda they participated in the 2020 edition of Colombiamoda, one of the most important fashion events in the country. This positioning is the result of its products reception in the social networks, its main commercialization channel at national and international level. This has allowed them to obtain greater income, which has not only benefited the project, but the AETCR in general, due to the fact that these resources finance general maintenance issues in the context

For Martín Batalla, peace means solving the structural causes that gave rise to the armed confrontation, such as access to land, stigmatization, and political participation, among others. Confecciones La Montaña is contributing to this issue, since, in the first place, it is generating conditions for successful reincorporation. In addition, they are beginning to contribute to the economic development of the region and to create economic alternatives to the territories affected by the conflict.

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