Affable, dynamic Gino Catena (age 43), probably wearing his Elliott Ness-style fedora, is today the CEO of BGL Avigros, the company where he first started work as a warehouseman. After doing an accounting baccalaureat and his military service, this son of a printing executive first discovered the poultry and game pavilion of Rungis Market in 1981, when the company name was BGL (Brunet-Gautheron-Legall). From warehousing, he moved on to work the cash register, then billing and finally sales (on commission) in 1985. As sales manager, and partner in 1991, Gino Catena devoted all his energy to developing the company and was appointed CEO in April 2003, with Olivier Binois as managing director. Created in the heart of Les Halles de Paris in 1896 and called Brunet-Mallarmé-Bisson at the time, the company is well known for the quality of its products and now has twenty five employees. “We specialized in products from the South-West and our flagship products include fattened duck (110 tons/year of exclusively French-produced raw duck foie gras from Gers and Landes), quality label, free-range poultry, whole-drawn label chicken, guineafowl, quail and pigeon cuts, as well as so-called exotic products like bison and ostrich. In season, game represents a large part of our volumes; it is imported from Austria, Germany, Italy and the United Kingdom. We are also the specialists on an exceptional product, the Geline de Touraine chicken breed. We sell just over 8,000 tons of poultry and game per year, with a strong peak in December obviously, spread over roughly 500 traditional listed products.
We are positioned in the top and medium-range and almost all our products are sold in the auction room. 65% of our clientele is made up of traditional retailers (butchers and poultry retailers, in shops and on markets, delicatessens and caterers), 12% restaurant owners (including some very famous names like Yves Camdeborde’s La Régalade or Thierry Faucher’s L’os à Moelle), 20% wholesalers and a few large and medium-sized supermarkets (3%). We try to defend our suppliers’ brand image and satisfy our customers at the same time. Rungis is an efficient market that listens to its clientele. It’s a very dynamic market in which I have a lot of faith. Today, we have replaced standard products with labelled products and quality has improved because of greater selection among suppliers and clients. However, the logistics has to keep pace, because it is essential to the Market’s development.” An accomplished athlete (six Paris Marathons with a personal record of 3 hrs 23 minutes), Gino Catena runs his company for the long-term, which is why he did a joint course at IFG (Institut Français de Gestion) and DPME (Direction des Petites et Moyennes Entreprises).
