Spain’s retailers opting for more homegrown apples and pears

Spanish supermarkets sell a higher proportion of homegrown apples and pears today than ten years ago, new research from Catalan fruit association Afrucat shows.

On Thursday the association presented the latest findings of its retail monitoring service Infolineal, which tracks retail produce sales across Spain.

In 2015 – the first year Infolineal was published – more than half of the apples on sale in Spanish supermarkets were imported, while 47 per cent were grown domestically. Last year, national production accounted for 61 per cent of top fruit sales.

Afrucat qualified the findings by noting that the first Infolineal only collected store data from four cities – Barcelona, Lleida, Zaragoza and Madrid, while the most recent report also includes data from Donosti, La Coruña, Valencia, Sevilla y Tenerife.

The report noted that the price of imported apples not only remains higher than that of national apples, but that the price difference has increased over the last 10 years, rising from €0.59 to €0.92. Last year, national apples retailed for €2.55/kg on average, while imported ones sold at €3.47/kg.

Afrucat’s general manager, Manel Simon, said: “Data shows that while the volume of imported apples sold since 2004 has been fairly constant, there has been a significant increase in the supply of national apples on the shelves. This leads us to value the approach that supermarkets have taken towards local production, but it also makes us wonder where all these imported apples that continue to arrive are being sold”.

Simon acknowledged that there is still a lot of work to be done in the traditional stores, which represent 30 per cent of total sales. “We are talking about the small neighbourhood shop that is mainly supplied by wholesale markets, where we find a large amount of imported fruit and, above all, fruit that is not correctly labelled, preventing the consumer from exercising their right to be informed and to choose national products”, he said.

In pears, the situation is different. In 2015, homegrown pears accounted for half of the sales in 100 per cent of the surveyed retailers, while in 2024, some supermarkets chains sold less than 50 per cent of local product. Imported pears accounted for 21 per cent of total pear sales.

“This situation is closely related to recent years of inclement weather, droughts, heat waves and frosts, which have drastically reduced Spanish pear production and have favoured the increase in imports,” Afrucat said.

It noted that the price difference between national and imported pears is smaller than for apples and has been reduced in the last 10 years, going from €0.68 in 2015 to €0.52 last year. This meant national pears cost an average of €2.81/kg, while the imported one cost €3.33/kg.

Afrucat also set out the impact that Mercosur trade agreements is likely to have on Catalan apples and pears as limited in the short term.

According to Simon, “in the short term, this could be considered an opportunity and could open the doors to export to Argentina, which has been a closed market for years. In the long term, however, it is important that the rules of the game are clear and, above all, that the mirror clauses are complied with, preventing apples and pears from being produced in these countries under more lax protocols than those in Europe”.

To ensure compliance with these clauses, Simon said “it is not enough to analyse the product at the point of entry; it is also necessary to ensure that the rules are respected during production and not allow unfair competition”.