As Ramadan continues to move earlier each calendar year, timing of the religious event has passed backward through the start of the season for Medjool dates from the Bard Valley in the US and Mexico.
The year, Ramadan will wrap up less than a week before the predicted start of the Bard Valley harvest, which means no new-season product will reach Asian markets in time, and demand is expected to overshoot supply.
“We’ve had relatively heavy shipments of Medjool dates to Asia starting in late April,” said David Nelson, vice president of sales of Bard Valley Medjool date packer-shipper Datepac, based in Yuma, Arizona.
“Most of our fruit has shipped during the first couple of weeks in May and will finish up by the beginning of June. `Ramadan` demand has been quite good this year. Even though we have a larger Medjool crop this season, there is more demand than we have product to offer.”
New production is expected to come online over the next few years from young palms and ease the supply situation, as will the earlier timing of Ramadan each year, detailed Edward O’Malley, president and CEO of Datepac.
“As Ramadan gets earlier every year and closer to the start of the harvest, in some ways it makes it easier to supply because there are more stocks available,” he told Fruitnet.com.
Indonesia, Malaysia and Australia are the largest buyers of Medjool dates in the Asia-Pacific region, and Australia is in fact the largest export destination for Bard Valley dates and highest per capita consumer of the Medjool variety, with a significant spike in consumption over Ramadan.
Australia’s major supermarket chains Coles and Woolworths have done significant work building sales of Medjool dates over a number of years, said Damon Watling of Quality Produce International, Datepac’s largest importer of Medjool dates in Australia.
“Every Coles and Woolworths and most greengrocers will have a box of dates on the shelf every day of the year, which doesn’t happen anywhere else in the world,” he explained.
“The supermarkets will sell as many dates, if not more, over Ramadan as they do for the entire year.”
The supermarket chains regularly put date promotions in local Islamic community centres and newspapers over Ramadan, and sales both over Ramadan and over the rest of the year continue to grow.
