A village of 224 residents and a salad that travels as far as Korea: the story of Suflí’s preserves
Since 1985, Desuflí has been making the Almanzora’s traditional preserves by hand in Suflí. They already reach Europe and Korea, and this year they are dreaming of the United States.
Automatic translation: this article was translated with artificial intelligence from the original in Spanish. Read the original
Suflí is home to 224 people, but the village’s name travels much further, written on the label of a jar. Since 1985, Desuflí has been making traditional preserves by hand in this corner of the Alto Almanzora (Upper Almanzora), the kind that families in the district used to prepare at home with whatever the vegetable garden produced. Today those jars are sold in France, Germany, Sweden, Italy and Korea, according to the company itself, and its next goal lies on the other side of the Atlantic.
An idea with roots
The story began with a simple idea. Its founders, Antonio Serrano and María del Pilar Jiménez, decided “to showcase and make known the artisan preserves that for so many years the people of the area had made for their own consumption”, with the vegetables that were grown alongside the Almanzora river. This is recorded in the company’s profile on Sabores Almería, Almería Provincial Council’s quality brand, to which Industrias Alimenticias de Suflí belongs.
More than forty years later, the recipe has not changed: local vegetables and fruit, with no preservatives, colourings or thickeners, cooked in a bain-marie and with the smoky touch of vegetables roasted “over holm oak charcoal embers”. On its website, the firm sums it up in a single sentence: they follow “the traditional methods passed down by generations of parents and grandparents”.
The flagship product is La Ensalada de Suflí (Suflí salad), which has gradually been joined by local peppers, fritada, pisto, sofrito, escalivada and seasonal orange, fig, strawberry and apricot jams. All of it, as they proudly point out in their presentation, is “handmade” and produced “as before, as always”.
Bound for the United States
The big leap came very recently. In 2024, the company launched an internationalisation plan with European funds and the Chamber of Commerce’s Xpande programme. In September 2025, the year of its 40th anniversary, it said on its website that it was going to “take a giant step”: attending, for the first time, the Americas Food & Beverage Show in Miami, where Spain had one of the largest pavilions. “This year is proving very significant for us because, as well as being our 40th anniversary, we are becoming increasingly well known, both nationally and internationally,” they wrote at the time.
This year they have returned to Alimentaria, in Barcelona, on the Sabores Almería stand, and they make no secret of where they want to get to: “Our big goal this year is, without a doubt, to be able to break into the United States and to earn ourselves a place in this great country.” And they are approaching it, they say, “with great excitement, eagerness and positive expectations”.
The name of a small village
Suflí is one of the smallest municipalities in the Almanzora Valley: according to the 2025 padrón (the municipal register), only Cóbdar, Laroya and Bayarque have fewer residents. That is why every jar that leaves Calle Las Eras carries something more than roasted peppers. It carries the village’s name to fairs and tables in other countries, and with it, that of a district that does not want its time-honoured flavours to remain only a memory.
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