Chile is to launch it first ever marketing campaign for prunes in China in 2014 in a bid to boost shipments to the Asian country. Andrés Rodríguez, CEO of Chile Prunes, said the promotion would consist mainly of point-of-sale activities backed up by a PR campaign.
China has a high per capita prune consumption rate but the market is almost exclusively for the domestically-grown Wumei variety. “The Chilean prune, which the Chinese call Ximei, is very different to the local variety, and still relatively unknown in China,” said Rodríguez. “The small volume we have shipped up to now has been well received and we have high hopes of establishing a market for our prunes in the future.”
Chile shipped 2,500 tonnes of prunes to Asian last year, representing just 3 per cent of total Chilean exports. Of these, around 70 per cent went to Hong Kong and China.
