How the Bermeo brothers built success on failure

Losing a key customer would send most entrepreneurs into a panic. Instead, the Bermeo brothers turned it to their advantage in launching their own healthy snack business.

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Ecuadorian entrepreneurs the Bermeo brothers

Sometimes the best business ideas come as the result of a setback. Ecuadorian entrepreneurs David and Raul Bermeo watched in horror as their father's dried vegetable business collapsed in 2005 after the global giant Nestl, his biggest client, halved its order. Scrambling to find a way to survive, they decided to found TerraFertil ("good land') with two friends, with the goal of becoming the leading dried fruit exporters in the world. Fittingly, their first piece of capital investment was their father's idle driers.

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Dr Matthew Partridge
Shares editor, MoneyWeek

Matthew graduated from the University of Durham in 2004; he then gained an MSc, followed by a PhD at the London School of Economics.

He has previously written for a wide range of publications, including the Guardian and the Economist, and also helped to run a newsletter on terrorism. He has spent time at Lehman Brothers, Citigroup and the consultancy Lombard Street Research.

Matthew is the author of Superinvestors: Lessons from the greatest investors in history, published by Harriman House, which has been translated into several languages. His second book, Investing Explained: The Accessible Guide to Building an Investment Portfolio, is published by Kogan Page.

As senior writer, he writes the shares and politics & economics pages, as well as weekly Blowing It and Great Frauds in History columns He also writes a fortnightly reviews page and trading tips, as well as regular cover stories and multi-page investment focus features.

Follow Matthew on Twitter: @DrMatthewPartri