By: Héctor García O., Co-Founder and General Manager of Diagnofruit Laboratories Ltda, SOCHIFIT Member [email protected]
A few weeks ago we were invited to participate in a biotechnology event for Colombian agriculture, focused on well-established crops such as flowers and other growing crops such as blueberries and avocados. It was in this context that I became aware, surprisingly, of a situation that I thought was peculiar but that I later understood could be quite widespread in Latin America.
My presentation dealt with how we could adapt monitoring systems, whether productive, disease, pest, and management, that we use in fruit growing in Chile, to the Colombian flower export model. To provide context for our experience as a country, I showed key statistics on fruit export levels and positioning in the Southern Hemisphere. Obviously, and with great pride, I showed the extraordinary moment that Chile is going through with cherry production, where we are the number 1 country and concentrate 96% of the cherry supply in this part of the globe (Chart 1), without strong competitors, yet.
However, after the talk, something happened that left me somewhat baffled, mainly because of one detail: the audience was made up of technicians from exporters and agrochemical companies, experts in biotechnology, producers, in other words, people trained in the field, who have traveled and are certainly accustomed to identifying various horticultural products. So, what was my surprise? Several attendees asked me about cherries, but they understood this fruit as MARASQUINO, so they did not understand that such a successful industry was based on a processed product of at least questionable quality in terms of fruit.
As the days went by, we continued asking questions and realized that cherries were not a well-known fruit in the land of coffee and this was repeated in other countries in the neighborhood. So, back on the plane, I asked myself, how important would it be for our sales to introduce cherries with a country brand beyond China and looking at our neighborhood as the first pole of development?
The truth is, I don't have the answer. I don't know how much Latin America could relieve us of the high seasonal production of our cherries or how good a business it would be based on the prices that these markets are willing to pay. I am far from being a good fruit seller, but I am sure of one thing: Chile must position cherries as its star product and encourage consumption globally, and as Carlos Tapia mentioned a few days ago in conversation with Trio Kimün: “We are the best producers of this fruit in the world”, and therefore we can produce the BEST CHERRY IN THE WORLD, For this we must characterize it, differentiate it and disseminate the certainties.
During my years at Antumapu, some things stood out, including a class by Professor Marco Schwartz when he taught us the “Philosophy of the 3 Cs,” which was something like the phases for the development of an idea or business: copy – buy – create. In this way, when I have an idea I put this maxim into practice, the cheapest thing is always to copy (obviously in a fair fight, retrieving experiences, establishing the state of the art well), in this sense What have our competitors done? And the strongest answer is the case of kiwi and New Zealand.
Kiwifruit, quite simply, is a fruit that is not very attractive to consumers. It must be peeled, and the probability of tasting an inedible one is high, since it could easily have been harvested when it was not ripe enough. However, despite all this and due to a very well thought-out program in New Zealand, now managed by Zespri, kiwifruit is eaten in every corner of the planet and all year round, with sustained increases in production and consumption (Chart 2) (Chile does not currently have this trend, but that is for another analysis). Zespri generated and extended knowledge about the organoleptic, nutritional and nutraceutical benefits of kiwifruit, in addition to a whole logistics machinery, and it displays everything on a regular basis in its most important markets, raising the image of kiwifruit with the registration of the New Zealand brand as the best in the world, in some way in harmony between scientific-technical evidence and marketing, which leaves consumers very confident in the product they are consuming.
Perhaps the time has come to create, to create a brand because we have the best cherry in the world, which certainly arrives in China and is sold as a treasure, to an ancient, very demanding culture that knows its benefits. We must bring its nutritional properties to life, superfood?, increase local research; for example, I am sure that the antioxidant level of our cherries is higher than that of cherries produced under a fast-selling scheme, to mention one potential differentiating characteristic, there must be many more that we should consider. The comparative advantages over what Zespri had to work on are obvious, the cherry does not have to be peeled, just looking at it makes you want to try its delicious flavour, there is no need to wait because it is harvested when ripe for consumption, in this way it is a fruit that does not disappoint you easily and in this sense, we have defined the minimum quality and ripeness parameters, we just need to come to an agreement, continue working on the technical development of the industry and invade the world in red, the colour that coincidentally represents Chile in sports.
The call is to go for more, China will continue to be the main objective, but we have the possibility of positioning the fruit with the Chile brand in the world, a joint, multidisciplinary work is necessary, which I am convinced will end up providing a key step to achieve the desired sustainability for our industry.
Happy Harvest 2022-23!
