Our story starts in 1980 when Mr. Jaktiek Unjittikul started trading tomatoes encouraged farmers in the North East of Thailand to grow tomatoes and then helped create a new market for these tomatoes by bringing them to Bangkok and selling them to national food manufacturers.

 

To provide increased value for the tomato farmers, SAI set up a factory, the first of its kind in the North East of Thailand. Constructed with state of the art tomato processing equipment from Italy, Initial orders were to provide tomato paste, which remains the key product to this day, to manufacturers of tinned sardines and tomato ketchup producer, Heinz, to whom SAI still provides tomato paste to this day.

 

Since the start of operations, close collaborations with farmers have been the foundation of SAI’s successes and to this day, SAI continues to operate a contract farming approach through which farmers in the area surrounding the factory provide high quality raw materials in exchange for financial support and agricultural know-how from SAI. The company’s contract farming network currently consists of around 4,000 farming families.

 

As the first Thai tomato paste factory to receive international certification for HACCP, GMP and HALAL, SAI has grown to be the leading Thai supplier of Tomato and other fruit and vegetable products to both the domestic and international market, particularly Australia, Japan, Hong Kong, Singapore, South Korea and Taiwan. As well as acting as an OEM, SAI also has its own brand of tomato paste and diced tomatoes, “Buck Lane”, which is the word for Tomato in Thailand’s North Eastern dialect.