Alejandro García-Huidobro, founder of Prize, calls for greater collaboration and market diversification ahead of 2025/26
The head of one of Chile’s biggest cherry export companies has urged the industry to put on a united front as it prepares for the forthcoming season.
In an interview with Chilean fruit association Frutas de Chile at the recent Global Cherry Summit in Chile, Alejandro García-Huidobro, founder and general manager of Prize, said the industry must develop joint strategies and seek further market diversification to meet the challenges of the future.
“We need to focus on the fruit that adds the least value. The key to success is for the industry to be 100 per cent united because the decisions we make, which will be dynamic over time, will depend on the industry’s representation and on the implementation of objectives,” he said.
Asked about how he would prepare for the 2025/26 campaign, García-Huidobro noted: “I think the entire focus will be on how we prepare as an industry. We’re facing a prisoner’s dilemma. That is, if we all cooperate to do something, to reach agreements, for example, on a certain calibre or quality, it’s a sacrifice for everyone, but it will allow us to be much better off.
“The key thing is that we achieve representation on the Chilean Fruit Cherry Committee through a new governance framework, where not only exporters are represented, but also producers are fully represented. Hopefully, we’ll reach 100 per cent of the industry and together we can make decisions that are in our hands and that are very necessary.”
García-Huidobro predicted that growth in 2025/26 would be at a more moderate pace than last season. “We at Prize haven’t invested in new cherry plantations for a long time and decided to diversify, so currently, cherry plantations represent less than 15 per cent,” he told Frutas de Chile.
“We don’t have our own orchards coming into production, so we’re going to grow at the same rate as the industry will grow (6 per cent), given that we made decisions to diversify into other countries. Therefore, we are calm and optimistic about what’s coming, where the decisions made five years ago were important.”
When asked if it’s necessary to diversify markets, García-Huidobro commented: “If we do things right, in five years we can diversify by 10 per cent more, so we’ll have 80 per cent in China. The specific issue here is that we’ve grown a lot; the industry’s volume has increased by 50 per cent.
“That’s what’s got us in this problem, and then there are the problems of quality, logistics, and others. But if we had had the same quality and logistics, with 80mn cartons, we’d be talking about different things. Therefore, we must move forward. There are things that may change along the way, but the great news is that this problem is in our hands to solve.”
