What Veeam’s Role at Unifrutti Says About Modern Agriculture

There is little to no room for error for a product like fresh fruit and produce, especially once it enters the modern supply chains. Temperature drift, missing records, or delayed recovery are not abstract operational issues; they directly determine whether produce can be sold or must be discarded. Unlike manufactured goods, fruit continues to degrade while systems are being fixed, which makes time, accuracy, and continuity inseparable.

For Unifrutti Group, this reality defines how technology is treated inside the business. Founded in Italy in 1948 and now part of Abu Dhabi–based investment company ADQ, Unifrutti operates farms across four continents and manages more than 14,000 hectares of land. What appears to be a traditional agricultural operation is, in practice, a distributed data system spanning rural farms, logistics centres, and international shipping routes.

Every stage generates records that carry commercial weight. Harvest data, packaging logs, temperature readings, and shipping documentation are used not only to optimise yield and freshness but also to satisfy regulatory and customer requirements in global markets.

“We gather and log data at every stage of harvesting, packaging, and shipping, with the goals of maximizing quality and freshness,” said Dewet Blaauw, Group Network and Security Manager at Unifrutti. “We use this data to ensure the product is delivered to the end customer with the quality they expect, so maintaining complete records is essential to our profitability and ongoing optimization of our crops.”

Why downtime costs more than IT budgets

In many industries, downtime is measured in lost productivity or delayed output. In fresh produce, the cost is more direct and more final. A shipment can become unsellable not because fruit has visibly spoiled, but because the data proving its condition is incomplete or inaccessible.

Unifrutti operates in environments where disruption is routine rather than exceptional. Farms are placed where climate and soil conditions are optimal, not where infrastructure is most reliable. Power cuts, unstable connectivity, hardware failures, and security threats are part of the operating landscape.

“A farm is located where the environment and Mother Nature allow us to operate in the best way possible,” Blaauw said. “High availability of our systems and data is therefore key on our farms and in our head offices. We have very low tolerance for downtime. All our data must be protected and systems must be available 24/7.”

This low tolerance is driven less by digital ambition than by perishability. When systems fail, there is no buffer period in which to investigate slowly or rebuild at leisure. Recovery speed determines whether fruit reaches customers or becomes waste.

Building resilience across uneven terrain

For more than six years, Unifrutti has standardised its data resilience approach around Veeam, using a combination of on-premises and cloud-based backups depending on location. Central IT teams manage deployments through a single interface, while local environments are configured to reflect the realities of each site, including farms with limited connectivity.

“We review all our technology selections on a semiannual basis and Veeam is the top choice for our needs again and again,” Blaauw said. “The usability of Veeam is streets ahead compared to competing products.”

From Veeam’s perspective, Unifrutti’s case illustrates a broader argument the company makes about resilience being operational rather than aspirational. In its press note, Veeam frames its role as enabling organisations to continue operating through disruption rather than simply restoring systems after the fact.

Veeam said it believes “every business should be able to bounce forward after a disruption with the confidence and control of all their data whenever and wherever they need it,” describing this approach as “radical resilience.”

That framing matters in sectors like agriculture, where disruption is not an anomaly but a constant background condition. What Unifrutti emphasises is not the theoretical capability of systems, but how they behave when something goes wrong.

According to the company, critical systems can now be restored in minutes. In one example cited, a failed upgrade of a business-critical ERP system was reversed in around eight minutes, often before operational teams were aware that a problem had occurred.

“If our systems go down, delicious fruit with a short window of freshness could go to waste,” Blaauw said. “Months of cultivating the perfect crop could be lost to an IT failure. With Veeam, we can avoid that nightmare.”

Cost discipline in a low-margin industry

Agriculture does not absorb technology excess easily. Margins are tight, pricing is volatile, and cost overruns scale quickly across global operations. Unifrutti estimates that its current setup delivers around 20 percent lower running costs compared to alternative data resilience solutions, helped by flexible licensing and the ability to reduce operating system expenses by running key components on Linux.

For Veeam, this is part of a wider positioning around total cost of ownership rather than feature accumulation. In its materials, the company emphasises that its platform is designed to support backup, recovery, security, and data portability without forcing organisations into complex or fragmented tooling.

That cost discipline also affects consistency. Systems that are expensive or difficult to deploy tend to be applied unevenly, leaving gaps at precisely the points where risk is highest.

Security has become part of the same calculation. Built-in malware scanning and immutable backups are used to protect both headquarters and remote farm locations, where delayed response can have disproportionate consequences.

“Veeam boosts our cyber-resiliency on two counts,” Blaauw said. “First, by equipping us with reliable, easy-to-recover backups. And second, with powerful integrated threat detection, which helps us give even our most remote locations additional layers of protection against cyber-crime.”

Old businesses, new fragilities

Unifrutti’s experience reflects a wider pattern in global supply chains. Businesses rooted in physical goods increasingly depend on invisible digital systems functioning continuously in the background. When those systems fail, the damage is not theoretical. It appears as waste, compliance breakdowns, and missed delivery windows.

“In some ways, we are in a very old business: delivering delicious fruit to customers,” Blaauw said. “The difference is that today our customers are all over the world, and we’re coordinating global supply chains with a product that can lose its freshness in seconds in the wrong conditions.”

From Veeam’s standpoint, this is precisely the kind of environment its data resilience narrative is meant to address. The company positions its platform as a way for organisations to maintain control over data across cloud, physical, virtual, and remote environments, rather than treating recovery as a last-resort event.

For Unifrutti, the value is less about narrative and more about outcome. When systems fail, recovery happens quietly and quickly enough that fruit continues moving and records remain intact. In modern agriculture, that difference is not cosmetic. It is the margin between continuity and loss.