Gulfood, the Gulf region’s largest food and beverage fair, returned to Dubai in February, attracting around 100,000 visitors keen to investigate the latest products to grace the market. For an established fresh produce trader like Fresh Fruits Company (FFC), the exhibition provided an ideal occasion to showcase its complete range, not least its new Hello Fruits collection of products.
“We are here to see not just buyers and sellers of fruit and vegetables, but processors, juicers, restaurants, hotels,” CEO Redha Mansouri told Fruitnet. “We are diversifying. We now have fresh-cut fruits, salads and fruit juices that we are supplying to the food service industry.”
The company moved into fresh-cut fruits and juices around two years ago, according to Mansouri, having identified a gap on the market for ultra-high-quality products. “We would like to fill this gap,” he said. “The shelf-life may be short for such products, which last for only around 2-3 days, but the trend is currently for both healthy and natural products.”
The company has since added healthy salads, sandwiches and other snacks to the range, designed for use in the hospitality sector. “We use the highest quality possible,” said Mansouri, “so we import everything by air.”
The market for berries has also been growing strongly in the Gulf region in recent years, and mixed berry packs form an important part of the company’s Hello Fruits range.
“Berries have been growing fast over the past five or six years,” said Mansouri, “especially blueberries. We used to have just two sources for blueberries, one in the Northern Hemisphere and one in the Southern Hemisphere. Now there are sources everywhere. Even in the Middle East, blueberries are being cultivated, and now they are trying to grow raspberries as well.”
The proliferation of sources means that the company can switch to an alternative source when the price rises beyond a certain level. “This creates competition between the sources,” said Mansouri. “So in Latin America, Peru, Chile and Argentina all compete on price for their share of the blueberry market. In the Middle East, it used to be all Driscoll’s when it came to berries. Now there are a lot of players. The owners of the varieties even market themselves. We used to import big volumes from Egypt, especially strawberries, but now we get a lot from Greece, which offers great quality, large sizes and good packaging.”
The company’s mixed berry packs contain strawberries from Greece, blackberries from the US and blueberries from Chile, all imported by air and packed in the company’s Dubai facilities. “We have the biggest facilities in Dubai,” said Mansouri, “which allow us to offer a full basket of fruit and vegetables to our customers. We now even have coldstores that we rent out to other traders, known as The Fresh Market Wholesale.”
