Week 50

It is hard to believe that this will be our last Market Report for 2020. It’s been a particularly challenging year in various ways but also one of the most positive.

I am extremely fortunate that in my role I get to travel the country working with both growers and retail partners who are all very much focused on improving productivity, performance, consumer availability and eating experience. The primary aim without doubt, is to improve consumer awareness and repurchase decisions.

It makes writing updates such as these relatively simple in that in avocados we have a great product with strong demand and sufficient scale and volume.  This combined with an open and honest relationship with our supply partners and customers ultimately makes positive things happen.

In what has been a phenomenal year to date, my pre-Christmas message is really quite boring and mirrors the industry flow-plan.  Satisfactory export pack-outs have prevailed combined with strong offshore demand and pricing. Fruit being left to size is in some cases obliging and the wave of small fruit has been well managed across the industry to date. To be frank, exporters have approached the small fruit challenge with a combination of common sense and skill.

Domestically we are seeing some price pressures as export volumes ramp up across December and this is likely to continue into January. Values have dropped back from the prices tabled in our last report and whilst lower than at any part of the season so far, they still represent solid value.

As we look toward 2021 there is little doubt that larger sizes (16 to 20) will be extremely limited. Logic would dictate that there will inevitably be large volumes of smaller fruit with size 30 likely to dominant shelf space. How this impacts pricing across the size range is somewhat unknown. What we can say is that our retail partners are pushing through good volumes and are working with us to ensure the right pricing levels are set. We will need to keep fruit flowing whilst focussing on consistent values and avoiding significant one-off price drops which, if they occur, will ultimately destabilise the market.

On behalf of the team at Zeafruit we hope you all have a fantastic holiday break – or at worst a cold beer after a hot day harvesting so that we have fruit across the short weeks.

We thank you for your ongoing support and we look forward to finishing this year off and getting into 2021.