Rosehip is the fruit of a species of wild rose which grows on all kinds of soil in nature, is highly resilient and used from ancient times in making herbal infusions and preserves. From late August to mid-September, lines of shrubs full of these distinctive red fruit can be seen on the plantation of the Agrose family enterprise from Mladenovac. Initially, they started growing rosehip so that they could sell it as a raw material. 

- Once our first plants reached their full fruit bearing capacity, we realised that we should dedicate ourselves to processing. First we were mashing rosehip berries into the pulp used in making jam. The market did not have much of this at the time, and what could be found, was of poor quality, since rosehip is very hard for manual processing. The results of this processing effort were excellent, and it motivated us to go on – says Igor Petrović, the owner of this business.

Since the rosehip season lasts for three months, the mashing machinery used to be idle for the rest of the time. Agrose got the idea to make it useful by offering the service of fruit mashing for personal needs. Therefore they started to mash other fruit, such as plum and apricot.  

- As we were mashing rosehip and other fruit, up to 30% of the raw material was wasted, and we started to think about further processing. That is how we discovered the technology for the processing of the residues and new products were created: cold pressed oil, flour used in human nutrition and briquettes used for heating and fertilisation. At that point we realised that we had reached a well-rounded process in which we created no waste – explains Petrović.