Goran and Ivan Dell’Orco (Marikomerc): Our goal is to place 50 percent of our production in foreign markets

It could be said that Goran Dell’Orco is living the dream of most domestic entrepreneurs: he started and developed a business and passed it on to his son, who invested knowledge, effort, and skill into it and continued to develop it. More precisely, they are still building the business story together, Ivan Dell’Orco as the CEO of the reputable Zadar-based production and trading company Marikomerc and Goran as the owner, founder, and procurator.

It all started in 1990 when Goran Dell’Orco founded Marikomerc, a company primarily engaged in the trade of fish and fish products.

– I realized there was room for frozen fish trade, so I started importing and distributing such fish to the domestic market. We opened a sales point at the Zadar market and began distributing various types of frozen fish: hake, scorpion fish, squid of all kinds, shrimp, lobsters… We started cautiously because there was an abundance of fresh fish on the market, so selling frozen fish in Zadar was not easy. However, the tourist season increased demand, and restaurateurs could finally supply themselves with various types of frozen fish and have it constantly available – recalls Goran.

Thus, alongside the retail outlet at the Marikomerc fish market, he quickly began distributing frozen fish to restaurants and hotels, which enabled faster growth and development.

Expansion into production

However, the company only gained real momentum with the opening of a production facility for processing and preparing frozen, semi-prepared products for thermal processing. Today, it has 136 employees, of which about forty are employed in direct production.

In 2008, it relocated its operations to the newly established Business Zone Grabi in Poličnik near Zadar, in a facility of two thousand square meters, which today includes 400 square meters of production space. This was an investment worth approximately three million euros, realized partly through a bank loan and mostly with its own funds. The production facility was further equipped in 2012, with an additional investment of 400 thousand euros: half of the investment was financed by funds from the European Union, specifically from the then IPARD program, and half from its own revenues.

Before relocating to the industrial zone and building a new facility, Marikomerc had twelve employees, and with the growth in the number of employees engaged in production and logistics, it expanded its business to Dubrovnik and Rijeka by opening its own branches and storage space and began collaborating with distributors in Split and Zagreb.

– Initially, we supplied our products primarily to the HoReCa segment. Then problems began with finding qualified labor in hospitality. Our goal was to facilitate food preparation in hospitality establishments, reduce the need for storage space, optimize operations, and standardize the quality of culinary products, so we began producing cooked octopus, rings and tentacles of squid, fish skewers, and so on. In the first few years, we produced about twenty items, and today we have over sixty intended for hospitality and households – emphasizes Goran.

To find out how they successfully overcame all the crises that befell them and what their plans for the future are, read the new issue of the printed and digital edition of Lider.