A strong relationship with our customers is very important to us. Therefore we often visit customers and do market visits to experience the development in these specific areas. Recently our colleagues Charika Sundermeijer, Pieter Quartel and Corné van de Klundert, visited Denmark and Sweden.
Besides meeting our customers and partners, the aim of this trip was to review the grape season which came to an end and to kick off the citrus season which is about to start.
Looking back on the grape season, we have observed that grapes still represent a very important part of the fruit category on shelves in Scandinavia. It is a popular product, specifically our white and red seedless varieties. Our biggest volume is shipped in 10x500 gram packaging, although we noticed interest in other varieties and new types of packaging. This offers new possibilities for the market, since we offer our grapes in various packaging like loose packs and our high quality Sunpride packaging. There was interest in our Sunpride brand anyway, with which we made a small start in Scandinavia and hope to build on that in the coming year.
While the grape season is almost finished, we are about to start the citrus season. We expect continuous growth in sales of mandarins and lemons. The production of high quality mandarin varieties such as Nadorcott and Tango keeps increasing, leading to many possibilities for the Scandinavian market and consumer demands. Furthermore we recently introduced the Cara Cara Navels. This new orange variety will be marketed as pink orange and it is to be expected to increase sales due to innovation of the category.
Meeting customers is one of the key pillars of our approach. Charika mentions: “When meeting our contacts in person, you feel the relationship grows. Also during this trip, we have talked about so many possibilities for the future and brainstormed about new ideas. It gave us many new insights to further develop.”
