The founder of the Catalan yogurt group La Fageda, Cristóbal Colón, died this Thursday at the age of 77, according to the cooperative in a statement. Colón, born in the town of Zuera in Zaragoza, had been leading one of the largest inclusive projects since 1982, employing more than 850 people with disabilities. Despite being retired, Colón remained involved with the group’s philosophy to ensure that these values found generational continuity.
More than four decades ago, Colón went to the mayor of Olot (Girona) to ask for help. This psychologist by profession wanted to start a project to integrate people with intellectual disabilities after seeing the treatment they received at the center where he worked. With 14 of those residents, he started a project to provide them with employment. That company initially focused on gardening tasks. A brigade of ten people carried out maintenance work on public and private spaces in the region. And little by little, it evolved and grew.
By the late 1980s, the farm of that cooperative already had about a hundred cows and produced around 600,000 liters of milk annually, which was sold to Nestlé. It was in 1993 when La Fageda began the production and sale of yogurts. The first order was made by the Vall d’Hebron hospital in Barcelona, but soon it started producing 50,000 a week. Later came ice creams, jams, and large-scale production. Only 20 years later, the cooperative was manufacturing 60 million yogurts annually, which enjoy a great reputation among consumers for their quality.
Colón, together with his wife Carme Jordà, was at the helm of that project, which has grown from that group of fifteen people to include more than 850. Many of them with severe disabilities. “At La Fageda we are not dedicated to making yogurts, but to improving lives,” the founder of the cooperative often summarized. “From the beginning, we were clear about what La Fageda had to be. We are a social project whose framework is a company. For us, the company, the money, is a means and not an end. We want people to recover their dignity and self-esteem,” he said in an interview with EL PAÍS in 2015. “The project he launched more than 40 years ago has changed the lives of many people and has left a deep mark on our organization and on all those who have known it closely,” said Josep Maria Bonmatí, president of La Fageda’s board, in a note.
When he announced his retirement, he wanted to ensure that his legacy would find continuity. He finally left his position to Sílvia Domènech. “It is a day of deep sadness for all the people who are part of La Fageda. We say goodbye to our founder, but also to the person who, for more than four decades, was the soul and the engine of this project. His absence leaves a very deep void among those of us who have had the privilege of sharing the path with him,” the statement said.
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