March 2007: On European Soil
The Wormtech Report No. 10      

Wormtech marketing man Stuart Pedersen has recently been living in Europe and sent us some comments on kiwifruit marketing there.

“It’s a busy place, and most Europeans rarely give New Zealand a minute’s thought.  When we asked where they thought New Zealand was, more often than not they guessed somewhere near Switzerland.  (Thanks Russell and Brad?)  The better informed, in say France or Germany, would ask us why we nicknamed ourselves after a little brown furry fruit!  Europeans no more refer to kiwifruit than we refer to ‘orangefruit’.

“We saw lots of ‘kiwis’ in the supermarkets and greengrocers, all displayed with both origin and grade – presumably yet another EU regulation at work.  Quite often though we would see non-Zespri product in a ‘NZ origin’ case, or Zespri product claiming to be from Italy – refer to the photo below, from Spain.  The only standout product branding was the Zespri sticker, and to us it performed a vital role – telling us what was the real thing and what was not.

“We found the Zespri product to be consistently the best quality fruit – blemish-free, fresh and ripe.  Some other fruit was good too, but often it was old – regardless of the time of the year.

“Price did not seem to be a good indicator of quality – usually whichever kiwifruit was on display, the price was around E2.00-E2.50 (NZ$4.00-NZ$5.00) per kilo.  With citrus often much cheaper and stonefruit (in season) cheaper and of superb quality, it did not seem that there was much scope to charge the market more.

“But if we could just get them to eat a slice of NZ kiwifruit with every slice of proscuitto (yum!) we’d be made!”

Meanwhile, in local soils…

It has been a difficult year to get early fruit, and yet several new Wormtech customers have harvested earlier than in the past.  We look forward to seeing their.packout data.  Meanwhile we are getting promising results on some grower trials which we hope to report in the next Journal, some involving another new product idea which we are starting to get quite excited about.