Kristera is building a new sunflower oil processing plant in Northern Bulgaria

The agricultural company Kristera, part of the Agria Group Holding, plans to build a new plant for the processing of sunflower oil in Northern Bulgaria. The total value of the project is EUR 75 million, and the company will use a EUR 35 million loan from the European Investment Bank (EIB) for it. The funds will be invested in the construction of the base and in the purchase of railway carriages designed for transporting cooking oils.

The agreement between the bank and the company is supported by the InvestEU program, which aims to attract more than 372 billion euros of additional investment in the period 2021 - 2027. The program attracts investments for the EU's political priorities, such as the green transition, competitiveness, innovation and sustainable infrastructure.

With the support of InvestEU and EIB, Agria Group Holding, which is one of the leading grain producers and traders in Bulgaria, will optimize its own sunflower production and improve its access to foreign markets. The project will also create new jobs and will promote the resilience and viability of rural areas.

The new processing plant for crude sunflower oil will be built in the town of Popovo, Northern Bulgaria. It will use zero-waste environmental technologies that will benefit the climate by producing renewable energy from sunflower seed husk waste.

The project, which is expected to be put into operation in the second half of 2027, includes the purchase of rolling stock to transport the production to the Black Sea port of Varna, thereby reducing greenhouse gas emissions from motorized cargo transport.

We are happy to support the agricultural sector in Bulgaria through this new agreement with Agria Holding Group aimed at modernizing and expanding its operations. This is a project that will stimulate the country's regional and economic development in a sustainable way by financing investments in an underdeveloped region of the EU and will thus promote social cohesion and fair growth," said Kyriakos Kakouris, the Vice President of the European Investment Bank.

Agria Group Holding also emphasizes the importance of the project, adding that it will create an opportunity for significant diversification of its trade turnover, to reduce trade dependencies and enter new end markets and destinations.

In addition, this project has significant regional and economic importance, as its implementation will lead to the creation of a significant number of new jobs, improvement and optimization in the logistics of moving raw materials, replacing them with an end product. Plus, it will lead to significant economies of scale from a financial and operational management point of view," explained Emil Raikov, the executive director of Agria Group Holding.

Translated by Tzvetozar Vincent Iolov