Problems in store

The Huelva season got off to a good early start with a bright sunny January and early February but everything changed when temperatures dipped to the lowest levels for 30 years. This unprecedented temperature plummet has caused significant damage to citrus,raspberry and early stone fruit crops. The effect on strawberry was to reduce yields throughout the month of March. Despite the low production, retailers tried to maintain their price and ‘two for’ promotions.

Warm weather followed the cold; fruit was stacked on the plants with insufficient leaf to ensure all fruits were adequately supplied with sugar. Low sugars depress the eating quality of all varieties, especially those like Camarosa where sweetness is the only flavour characteristic of note.

The variety Sabrosa is one of those varieties that comes along every twenty years, and has enough good traits to shape and enhance the market for Spanish strawberry. However, sometimes we ask too much of a variety, in 2004 the variety was out performed by competitors on yield in many trials. This leads growers to push the variety harder to match the yields and earliness of other varieties. You can however push too hard and suffer the consequence with poorer shelf-life at the end of the supply chain letting down the consumer.

There has to be a balance between striving for early yield and high yields and achieving good customer satisfaction. There was plenty of evidence on the UK High Street that pushing for yield had caused an excessive amount of bruised and collapsing fruit. We have also seen high levels of return customers for the product when it has performed well. In contrast major retailers on the Continent have had waste figures of 25% as consumers have turned away from berries due to their poor eating qualities. If to get the right quality as a grower I can only achieve a seasons’ yield of 650 grams per plant, I am unlikely to want to see the retail value of £2 for two 400g punnets. To meet these retails I have to grow 800grams per plant, and if I do this it is very difficult to deliver to the consumer, the product life and eating quality I would want to provide.

There is plenty of evidence this year that the UK sales of Iberian fruit have been expanded, where the quality has been right and consistency good. We are competing in a market where Camarosa still features heavily and where the only means of building the sales of that variety is to be cheap. Over the season there were many poor products on offer in the UK that justified only the low prices (some didn’t even do this), but this gets in the way of better product, that requires and justifies a realistic return where growers have not compromised quality in order to hit high yields. If ever you needed to prove that varieties are capable of differentiating the market place, this was the year to see it.

Spring 2005