Prepared fruit, salads and vegetables enjoyed a rapid journey to the top, with popularity soaring and businesses booming up until as recently as 12 months ago. But the mighty must fall and the prepared category has done it with a thud, especially when it comes to the fruit offer.
Once a sector that could not fail to report significant growth every quarter, now the situation has definitely plateaued and retailers especially have had to put innovation on hold and limit the offer and choice for consumers.
“People don’t have prepared produce on their shopping lists any longer,” says one supplier to prepared processor Vitaal. “In order to save money, consumers have moved away from organic and prepared to conventional and wholehead. There has definitely been a slowdown in sales and demand has slipped away over the months. We were possibly one of the last areas of growth for the recession to hit.”
So after months of speculation, the recession has made its mark on the prepared industry and looks to be changing its make-up for some time. And although the eat-in trend has brought some hope, on the whole the prepared fruit industry has had to rein in and take a backseat.
Many insiders feel that the multitude of choice available that has now been axed from the shelves and menus due to wastage issues and lack of demand for niche offers is a step in the right direction for the prepared industry, and that it was just a matter of time before the offer was condensed. “We are selling fewer different kinds of prepared fruit, but people still pick it up,” ensures one source. “But people had too much choice. Something goes well in this industry and everyone jumps on board and then too much wastage is created and there are too many lines on the market. We had to be sensible and streamline the offer across the board.”
Sarah Cooper of Coopers Produce, which supplies prepared products to retailers and caterers, agrees. “It is a lower value market now and that is aiding the situation,” she says.
Packet sizes have had to be reduced and the product mix has changed to incorporate cheaper options to hit the £1 price point. “We have reduced the probably too plentiful offer and we now have to maintain a good standard of product sales on lines,” says an insider. “I think it is going to take a while for this situation to pass. People are not looking for a heap of new lines. There are some Christmas lines in the making, but we need to be realistic; there has been too much choice and the industry has suffered.”
Others are concerned about the changes being made to where the fruit and vegetables are being prepared. According to sources, supermarkets are driving for product to be prepared more and more at source in an attempt to save on costs and provide the freshest offer.
“This is not good for the UK industry and we are missing out,” says one supplier. “Supermarkets are giving away the business. The argument is that the product has got to be fresher, prepped at source and then flown, rather than shipped then prepared. But looking at the carbon footprint it is not the best way and are we really getting something fresher?
“When we have successful processing units here that are set up to do the job, it is ridiculous that the work is going elsewhere. This practice should be frowned on rather than encouraged.
“Labour is cheaper in these countries but they can get a good price for preparing produce in this country, which is the same quality or even better than preparing it at source and airfreighting it in. We have already put the expenditure into provisions here. You would hope that supermarkets would want to protect this industry, not do things that could damage it. It is pennies they are saving, not pounds.
“What are supermarkets actually doing to support the English grower? It is the same thing with the prepared industry; they don’t need to go abroad for everything. By not supporting the provisions in place, they are going to damage the industry, including the suppliers and even the overseas growers in the long run.”
Some retailers, such as Marks & Spencer, must be realising this. M&S initially prepped vegetable packs in the UK in the 1980s but then moved the business to source. However, in recent years the retailer has reverted back to processing in the UK. But others are looking to Brazil to prepare fruit mixes at source.
“Supermarkets are trying to find more margin in prepared products and there really isn’t any more,” says another source. “Aldi in particular is retailing prepared and wholehead fruit and vegetables at below cost. It is like the price that prepared lettuce and salads [elsewhere] are going for. £1 price points should not be acceptable. There is not enough slack there. The industry cannot keep on rolling back prices as quality standards are going to be compromised.”
As a result of price cutting, consumers are now only looking for prepared on promotion and the orders for promotional labels have gone through the roof. Whether these promotional prices are a good deal for the consumer is debatable though, with general practice consisting of putting the original price up higher so the half-price offer is not as cheap as it could be.
Catering is having a better time of it though and prepared salads, especially lettuce mixes, are still making their way onto café and restaurant plates up and down the country, as the summer continues to deliver warm temperatures.
“Of course the recession stands out like a sore thumb,” says Cooper, “but it isn’t deadly quiet on the catering front. Business is quite static, but people are spending no less. There has been a lift in salad lines because of the good weather and the balance has been restored with vegetable products when the weather gets cooler. We generally deal with Dutch or Belgian products for prepared lines because they stand up better to the process and are available in greater volumes, but the problem with that is the weather is very volatile.
“Iceberg lettuce in particular has had problems, pinking and browning when cut, and of course when there is a problem with availability, everybody wants it.
“But there are always challenges and we are hoping that it continues to be nice and busy.”
RESEARCH IS THE KEY TO SUCCESS
Hardly a week goes by without some research study into the health benefits of a particular food hitting the headlines, the latest being purple sweet potatoes fighting cancer and prickly pears and grapefruit combating obesity, writes Wendy Akers of PR consultancy to the fresh produce industry Mustard Communications, which handled the successful Fresh Prepared Salad Producers’ Group (FPSPG) campaign last year.
Many of these stories hit the press one day and are gone the next, with just a sudden spike in sales. But if the industry were to fund its own research and orchestrate the PR around the announcement of the results, the rewards could be much greater, sustained over a longer period and timed to coincide with good crop availability.
The Watercress Alliance, comprising Vitacress Salads, Bakkävor and The Watercress Company, has had the foresight to do just this, funding a number of university studies seeking to show a link between the consumption of watercress and ability of the body to fight cancer.
But how much does it cost? What are the benefits? And, critically, are the results of food industry-funded research projects perceived as credible? These were the questions asked by Radio 4’s Sheila Dillon on July 19 in a half-hour programme dedicated to watercress and the scientific research work it has instigated. It followed a comment in a previous programme by Professor Colin Cooper, of the Institute of Cancer Research, that it was “clear that diet causes prostate cancer”. But when it then emerged just how little research was actually being undertaken between the foods we eat and the cancers we get, there was a flood of concerned emails and letters.
Steve Rothwell, production and technical director at Vitacress Salads, who has championed the watercress industry’s involvement in cancer prevention studies, told the programme that watercress’s ability to fight cancer first came to prominence back in 1995, when American professor Stephen Hecht linked the consumption of the salad leaf with a decreased cancer risk in smokers. But the real breakthrough came in 2007 when the Watercress Alliance funded a human dietary trial with the University of Ulster. The results were extremely powerful, showing that the consumption of watercress can reduce DNA damage to blood cells by 24 per cent.
PR agency Mustard Communications organised a high-profile press conference at the Royal Society of Medicine which resulted in in-depth press coverage in every single daily national newspaper, as well as interviews across national TV and radio. Sales leapt by 40 per cent and this was sustained over several months.
“It is pointless conducting the research if you are not going to publicise it,” said Rothwell, “but the media can be sceptical. That is why we engaged with a very professional PR company, and we have been with them now for six years, and we only released information that was properly vetted, peer reviewed and published in recognised international journals.”
Professor Rowland, who led the research project, claimed that it was the media who often put a “spin” on stories rather than PR people. “Some 50-75 per cent of our funding comes from the food industry and it is important that we do this work,” he said. “We work in the area of diet and health benefits and we want our research to end up in people’s mouths, so to speak, rather than in a book on the shelf.”
Close to £250,000 has been invested by the watercress industry in scientific research and around the same again on publicising the results. But the sector has been completely transformed during this time, with sales more than doubling in retail value.
The PR campaign for the British Leafy Salads Association -including prepared lettuce - is in full swing, featuring farm tours, radio interviews and new recipe development. There will be a big push on warm salads in the autumn, including the tie-up with author, chef and TV presenter Anjum Anand. She was one of the first to create and write Indian recipes catering for the health-conscious cook. She has also had two prime-time BBC 2 TV series on Indian cookery, Indian Food Made Easy, and is in talks for her third series.
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