An interview with Carlo Suy/
The company’s history and the highlights and challenges of his career in pulses

Can you tell me a little about Casibeans and your products?

Casibeans started in 1935 as C.A. Suy. This was my father, Camille Albert Suy, who began the company at age eighteen! He was also present at the birth of the CICILS, today the GPC. During a business trip in 1968, he suffered a light heart attack on a plane between Manchester and London; luckily, he survived, although he was not allowed to return to the office. This meant the start of my career.

Casibeans specializes in delivering an upscale product, cleaned to the highest quality standards. We supply dry beans, be they white round, long, or giant. We also have dark reds, brown, black, speckled, black eyes, lentils, chickpeas, and lupins. All of our products are grown by our carefully selected partners worldwide and Casibeans’s expertise is combined with a pallet of customized services for our high-end food customers.


What are your best-sellers both in Belgium and in the wider European market?

In recent years, chickpeas have come much to the forefront but dark reds and white beans move well also. In addition, the evolution towards mixes with other flours and pasta is definitively a move forward.


What are some of your most memorable experiences as the head of Casibeans?

My development in the company included very early trips around the world to look for the best origins for our buying partners in pulses. I remember my first contacts with the East Asiatic Company in Copenhagen. They had offices in Bangkok and Beijing, among other places. Their very professional attitude went so far that their trainee staff in those foreign countries were not allowed to marry during their contract period: something unthinkable today from an employee rights point of view. The policy was both out of concern for the wellbeing of their young expat employees and from the perspective of wishing to maintain a stable company administration in a foreign environment. They were a good example and a stepping stone for Casibeans’s early development in inland China.

My first trip to China was in 1973. We discovered, 5 or 10 years later, all the possibilities for pulse growth in the northern part of China; they were the biggest growers. I don’t think anybody was aware of that at the time.

Eventually, we started offices in several distant places, like Dalian and Kunming in China and Bishkek in Kyrgyzstan. This was, of course, because we were in search of good, quality beans at competitive prices and now today we’re partly back where our founder started growing brown beans: Flanders in Belgium!

I also remember organising a CICILS — which later became the GPC — convention in Belgium in the 1980s; that left a good memory. It was the start of moving the conventions around, as previously it was basically always Paris, where CICILS was based.


The history of the GPC is fascinating. Have you been involved since the beginning?

I was closely involved with the evolution of the GPC, because the original brainstorming of it all was actually here in Antwerp. Together with French colleagues in Paris, we built on the existing French organization that was in place. I think it was the Belgians that said “Well, let’s take this a step further and try to find an international route to develop.” Of course, very quickly the English stepped in, and then the Germans a little bit later, and so on. I promoted the idea that we would go further and go to the Far East as well, so I’ve seen that happen along the way.

The original name for the GPC was CICILS, as I said: Confédération Internationale du Commerce et des Industries de Légumes Secs. I think that it began in the 1950s. The first secretary was Mr. Gautier in Paris. But I think that the GPC really developed and grew after the 1990s.


What are you most proud of during your time with Casibeans, personally and professionally?

My first steps in the company were as factory manager. Within 6 months, there were no secrets anymore about cleaning, splitting, milling, or any logistics. From there onwards, management was always in close cooperation with the staff.

Our 1970s expansion in the French market was challenging, but rewarding. In the 1980s, we built a new factory and hosted a Royal Visit after winning the Belgian Export Prize. And in 1988, with my father there, we celebrated 50 years of activity.


You must have seen significant changes in the pulses industry during your time running Casibeans. How has the company evolved in the decades since the 1970s?

Our company has indeed gone through many changes. We took our first steps toward the industrial level when we became millers and packers of consumer products from rice to pulses and seeds. After that, the rice world became dominated by a merger cycle which led to a monopolistic market in Northern Europe. We decided then to fall back on our pulses expertise and focussed on becoming a trustworthy supplier for many packers, canners,and frozen food factories. We remodelled the company in 1990 with that primary focus on pulses; it was a tough decision but it was the right one. Our expertise still exists today. We have to be creative just like everybody else in the world but the knowledge about the history of pulses helps us to find the right answers. 


How has the Belgian bean sector evolved overall? Have you noticed an increase in the acceptance of pulses in terms of domestic consumption?

The French and Southern European markets were traditionally pulses markets; the North less so. However, since about the year 2000, the interest in pulse products has risen. Immigration has certainly played a role, but health consciousness is also growing year by year.

I think that the next step will be the combination of pulses with science. An important evolution in pulses is to be expected and our cooperation with universities has grown very much in the past couple of years. 

Beans are “hot” again in Belgium and surrounding markets, and they have been gaining in popularity since the International Year of Pulses in 2016. Diets are evolving to be more healthy and plant-based. While the EU is still far from the recommended intake of plant-based protein per day, the direction is clear and pulses are one of the key solutions to get there. This is better understood nowadays than it was 30 years ago and, importantly, it is better understood by the end-consumers themselves.


People often feel that they grow and evolve personally along with their businesses, especially over a span of decades. Is there anything important that you’ve learned — any life lesson — during your years at the head of Casibeans?

The French actor Jean Gabin once sang something like “When I was 25, I knew everything, but now that I am 60, I know that I know nothing.” The world changes at an incredible speed, and it takes the right balance between personal and professional knowledge to cope in a good way with that. But trying to learn something new every day and trying to surround yourself with good people, personally and professionally, will help.

As I started to travel internationally very early, my appreciation for foreign cultures and for studying history grew on every trip. I studied Latin and Roman history, so these trips gave me the opportunity to compare Asian and African cultures with the West, which was very enriching. The main lesson was that respecting the past history of a country, be it China or Ethiopia, was a way of better understanding and appreciating partnerships.


What were your greatest professional challenges?

Trust is a great gift, and when you are in a situation where trust is put in the wrong person, disappointment may result. But, at the same time, you learn to be more careful.


What advice would you give to your daughter Caroline as she takes Casibeans into the future?

Be yourself. And see the answers to the previous two questions!


Retirement can mean finally having the time to do the things you could never fit in before and starting projects that matter to you. What are you excited about doing now?

I am still on the Board of a few organisations, and aside from that, I like to invest actively in the international stock markets. I enjoy a few rounds of golf every week. As for projects, there are some ideas about writing a book about family history and an interview about Casibeans.