New Zealand breeding institution HortResearch is urging growers and marketers to take heed of changing trends in consumer demand and seek new ways to ensure fruit can fight off competition from less healthy snacks.
HortResearch business leader Allan White, breeder of commercial topfruit varieties, including Jazz apples says the fruit industry is facing a new era of competition from manufactured snack foods and needs to adapt quickly or risk losing market share.
Speaking ahead of the world produce industry’s Southern Hemisphere Congress held in Capetown, South Africa this week, White said the fruit industry had a proud tradition of product innovation, but needed to increase the pace of new product development and keep a closer eye on food trends to ensure new fruit varieties were relevant to modern consumers.
The fruit industry could learn a great deal from the success of modern manufactured foods - especially in the areas of branding, promotion and market differentiation, he claimed.
According to industry research, supermarkets are offered between 5,000 and 6,000 new, altered or repackaged products each year.
“Seventy-five per cent of foods in the supermarket today did not exist 10 years ago or have changed markedly in that time,” said White.
“That is the extent food manufacturers will go to in order to ensure their products remain in step with changing consumer demands.
“If you couple that kind of continued innovation with strong branding it is little surprise that children these days are probably more able to list snack food brands than they are to name the most common apple cultivars.”
White believes the fruit industry needs to adopt a similar innovation culture, continuously reassessing how consumers relate to fruit and addressing shifts in demand around traits such as colour, novelty, health benefits, packaging and convenience.
He said: “Fruit breeding will always be a long-term process when compared to generating factory-produced products such as snack bars, but new molecular approaches to breeding are reducing breeding times and there is no reason why the development process cannot be further enhanced by paying more attention to the needs of the intended consumer.
According to White, this will require an unprecedented level of co-operation between all those in the supply chain, from scientists and breeders to growers, marketers and retailers.
“There will need to be an equal measure of both science push and market pull. For example, science will be able to tell industry more and more about fruit development and nutritional composition. Breeders will be able to use that knowledge to create new fruit varities, but they will need the markets to feed back accurate information about what specific attributes consumers want and will pay a premium to enjoy.
“One very successful formula will be to have a new variety of an existing fruit that consumers perceive as superior to previous offerings - fruit like the Jazz branded apple for example.
“The other example will be fruit that offers all the major desirable traits, such as novelty and convenience, as well as added benefits such as heightened health function. Properly controlled and branded these will be the superfruit of the future.
“They will transcend the barrier between fresh and processed foods and offer the best of both worlds. They will be available as fresh product or as ingredients in any number of other manufactured foods, but importantly, the fruit itself will be the selling point, ensuring that the long association between health and fruit is continued.”
No comments yet