New tech helps importer avoid the avocado hard sell

The UK is ripe and ready for growth. Despite the pressures of high inflation and reduced consumer spending power, there remains a defiant and remarkable appetite in the market for top-quality, perfectly ripe avocados. And it’s a market that only a handful of companies appear properly equipped to supply.

One such company is leading UK importer Worldwide Fruit. Fifty per cent owned by Fruition, a group of around 40 British growers, it has managed to develop an impressive business in avocados that complements those producers’ apple, pear, and stonefruit output.

“In the last five years, we’ve seen significant growth in the market, particularly in ripe and ready to eat,” explains Mark Everett, director of the company’s avocado business unit. The UK market is still growing, he says. In the 12 weeks to mid-May, the group noted a 12.5 per cent increase in sales. “Some of that was inflation, but underlying it is still volume growth which has come in and maintained itself in ready-to-eat. That segment was 16 per cent up in value and the same in volume.”

The group’s own numbers back up this impressive expansion story. It currently imports, ripens and packs about a million avocados each week – mainly from Peru, Chile, and South Africa. In 2023, it sourced almost 60m individual pieces of fruit from ten different countries – equal to around 3m cartons – for a turnover just shy of the £30m mark.

In some ways, for a business that had a much larger focus on topfruit just a couple of decades ago, that success has appeared more or less out of nowhere. But this would be an unfair assessment of a well-run commercial operation which already had an active role in the avocado import market, and took some very good decisions at the right moments. One such decision was a strategic procurement focus on building supply with larger-scale suppliers in existing countries of origin, rather than trying to source more from lots of different parts of the world.

Good fortune

However, it’s also fair to say that the company enjoyed its fair share of luck. When its packhouse in Spalding was ready for a refit around five years ago, it was already clear the avocado market was preparing for lift-off. And so, presented with an opportunity to meet rapidly growing, market-wide demand for consistent-quality avocados, it decided to invest in ripening technology called Softripe. Inspired by a visit to a banana ripening centre in Switzerland, it was the first such installation for avocados anywhere in Europe.

“Softripe has been a game-changer for us,” Everett insists. “It’s allowed us to ripen fruit without going into the rooms, with a far more controlled process where you micromanage the gas mix, you measure the fruit’s respiration, and then it tells you when the pallet of fruit is going to be ready.”

In the past, Worldwide Fruit’s ripening staff would put newly arrived pallets into a warm room, check them every day, and estimate the time they might be ready – usually after five or six days. As Everett points out, those days are over. “With Softripe, after 24 hours of the fruit being in the room, the system will tell you when the fruit is going to be ready.”

The technology, which was supplied by Frigotec and installed in collaboration with JD Cooling, means taking samples and cutting them open is no longer required. Over the course of the year, that equates to several hundred thousand avocados saved.

Cost advantage

There is a significant cost saving too in terms of the energy used. Softripe is reckoned to use about 30 per cent less electricity per kilo to ripen the fruit. Ultimately, that means better returns to the grower and better product for the customer.

“With Softripe, we found a system where we can get the fruit from an individual producer or even pallet to ripen far more consistently from fruit to fruit within that arrival batch,” Everett adds. “And because of that, our output now is more consistent in terms of fruit firmness and being in the ready-to-eat spectrum than ever before. We want to give our end consumers a great piece of fruit, a great experience. And where we sell product and class it as ripe and ready to eat, we want it to be just that.”

With more predictable quality at its fingertips, Worldwide Fruit recently started marketing year-round, fully ripe and ready-to-eat avocados to the wholesale and foodservice trade under its own brand.

As the company’s senior technical manager Alison Tagg points out, that new label is already winning over customers. “Because we’ve achieved complete consistency with Softripe and the procurement,” she says, “it’s a brand that is really driving itself.”