Good sales and bad sales

Everybody would agree that there are good and bad sales of soft fruit through the season. Growing news challenged Martin Seymour to explain a good sale from a bad sale.

"When asked about good and bad sales I think we need to consier the total English supply of soft fruit grown in the UK.

I feel that good sales are sales sold to a firm price, agreed weekly achieving retail prices of between 98p and £1.98. bad sales are not agreed at a fixed price, but sales where prices of between 25p and 50p a pound have been common place. These sales are generally comission sales and show no regard to the real cost of production of our products.

So how do we tackle the problem of bad sales?

We as a UK marketing company have good sales, guaranteed programmes for 6000 tonnes of UK produced soft fruit, but due to the fact that our current grower base have supplied us with 100% of their class one fruit and that this figure has not exceeded 4000 tonnes, in order to keep our customer base wupplied we have had to import in excess of 2000 tonnes of Dutch and Belgian Fruit, If there was a way of redistributing the current UK availability of soft fruit through existing marketing desks on a "best sale for the grower" basis we would not need to import in excess of 2000 tonnes of soft fruit. It is obvious to everybody that 1000's of tonnes of soft fruit have suffered bad sales through existing marketing companies exlucing our own. I would like to propose that UK growers ask their marketing desk and PO's why they haven't nominated our company to relieve them of the bad sales.

Advanced Marketing Services LTD and Well-Pict European Marketing LTD have been the best-kept secret from the majority of UK growers for far too long. Many marketing companies encourage growers to expand production without the ability to programme all of the fruit grown for them to a good sale. I call upon all UK growers to challenge their marketing desks and PO's to supply us and get rid of the bad sales, and of course I welcome comments on this request."

So to answer the question a Good sale is programmes, with a firm price agreed between buyer and seller thak takes into consideration retail asapirations and the needs of the producer.
As bad sale is one that does not!

Autumn 2002