Berry supplier wants to increase overseas grower base to meet rising demand from UK retailers
Soft fruit supplier Chambers is searching for new growers to partner with in Spain, Morocco and in particular Portugal to complement its UK production as it looks to increase supply to its UK supermarket customers.
Speaking to FPJ at Fruit Attraction, commercial director James Miller said premiumisation is a key trend in raspberries, Chambers’ biggest berry, with improvements in new varieties’ shelf life, size, flavour and year-round availability encouraging more shoppers to trade up.
Chambers joined the Marionnet Label cane-fruit genetics development programme in September, with a view to setting up a long-term varietal pipeline and bringing through more premium raspberry varieties.
Chambers has been growing Marionnet Label genetics (CRIV) for many years and has been working in partnership with CRIV for the past four years, driving UK selections from its genetic base.
In blackberries, meanwhile, Chambers recently extended the supply window for its large, high-Brix Sweet Royalla blackberries to 12 months by developing with existing partners in Spain and Morocco and adding new production in Portugal.
The overall outlook for the UK berry sector is positive, says Miller, with a marked increase in consumption among 18-24-year-olds in the last one to two years, reducing the sector’s historic reliance on pensioners as its core consumer group.
Quality, consistency, retail support, health consciousness, and social media messaging have been the key trends driving this shift, he believes.
The stated aim of trade body British Berry Growers (BBG) is to increase UK soft fruit production by 50 per cent in the next 10 years. To absorb this extra volume, Miller emphasises the need to open up new export markets but stresses that the EU will remain the key market.
To streamline exports, BBG is proposing a new way of gaining Defra approval for exports. For non-EU exports, exporters are currently required to schedule a Defra inspector five days before their approval visit.
BBG and other groups argue this is too far in advance for the exporter to know if they can, or will be ready to, export produce on a particular date. BBG would instead like to allow producers to apply to be classified as ‘low risk to export’ to remove the need for assessment each time they export.
