Berlin rocked to the beat of Israeli hip-hop dance group Shakatak last February, when Zeraim Gedera used the troupe to introduce its A Sense of Taste marketing campaign to the industry at Fruit Logistica 2007. Feedback since the launch has been excellent, according to marketing manager Tal Franck.
“The concept behind A Sense of Taste is experience - we believe that when you eat one of our products you experience something, and the idea is that consuming fresh vegetables should give you a good feeling,” she tells FPJ. “We divided our products into three groups - tomatoes, peppers and cucurbits - and then for each category tried to think of words and senses a consumer might associate with it. We are looking at tangible added value for each part of the supply chain.”
The campaign uses four of the 10 dancers from Shakatak to illustrate its grower catalogues and retailer brochures. “We have tried to aim our brochures at their different target audiences - for example, the grower catalogues feature more images of the plants on the trees, whereas the retail catalogues concentrate on images of the products ready to eat. We have a global strategy, but try to act local,” says Franck.
A Sense of Taste has generated really good feedback from various corners, she explains, as people are comfortable with the images of the dancers. “It was important to us that they didn’t look like models, but rather healthy, natural people.
“We also publish a quarterly newsletter, and this is probably our most important marketing tool,” she adds. “In this we include stories about the company, information about our global strategy, articles from researchers with a scientific angle and updates and results on our latest trials. The feedback from the newsletter has been unbelievable - for example we started with 400 mailing contacts in Spain last February, and by November this figure had risen to 1,400. We mail the Hebrew edition to more than 1,400 people in Israel, and the English edition goes to more than 2,000 people around the world. The message really spread in the industry by word of mouth.
“The best feedback is when we learn that growers are actually implementing the results of what we write about in the newsletter on their own farms,” Franck adds.
Zeraim Gedera was established by seven families in 1952, and its headquarters remain in Gedera, just outside Tel Aviv, to this day. Last year, the company was bought out by global seed giant Syngenta for £47.16 million from Markstone Capital Partners, the Israeli private equity group.
Zeraim Gedera’s core focus is six product lines - tomato, pepper, cucumber, squash, melon and watermelon - and the company uses a system of vertically integrated marketing (VIM) to create demand for varieties within the produce industry.
“Consumers do not tend to think about the work that has gone into the fresh produce they buy,” says Ohad Zuckerman, Zeraim Gedera president and ceo, speaking at last week’s international symposium at Tel Aviv trade fair Agro-Mashov. “It’s a long route to market for a new vegetable, and that always surprises people. Our seeds are the vehicle by which we bring our breeding know-how to the marketplace.”
Vegetable consumption is growing, according to Zuckerman, and companies like Zeraim Gedera need to keep on top of the trends, or they will not develop the right variety. “People eat vegetables because they are healthy, but over the last few years several crops have lost their taste due to the extension of their shelf life.”
Health issues aside, the taste and preparation time also play crucial roles in vegetable development, he says. “Consumers want a one-stop shop for nutrition, indulgence and convenience. However, growers’ needs include varieties that can combat global warming, with high resistance to heat, water quality, food safety, pest and disease resistance, traceability and good post-harvest traits. On top of this, all our varieties must have long shelf life and good taste.”
According to Zuckerman, being close to the market is paramount for a seed company, in a bid to understand your customers, assess the competition and ascertain the life cycle of a product. “Breeding takes time and is not an easy process; I cannot judge if a breeder has been successful or not until at least seven years have passed, although I can generally predict the outcome. We see a lot of new seed companies presenting varieties just one year after their establishment, but I would say this is impossible,” he says.
“All of our breeders start with thousands of plants and parental lines. We ask them to bring us 300 or 400 new plants to test, and these are whittled down to just one or two. Traditionally, a seed company’s approach was focused on the grower, with the aim of educating the consumer, but today we have to think about meeting the needs of both sides of the chain.
“For example, we send seeds to Mexico and Spain for production, but must know the demands of the US and UK consumers who the varieties are aimed at. Our mission statement is to create added value for all our partners in the fresh vegetable supply chain.
“The VIM approach involves developing varieties with added value, advising the retailers which ones are best for them, so they then tell the growers which ones they want. To be focused, we have to understand and find the answer to the needs and wants of everybody in the supply chain; and eventually, we have to offer varieties that contain all the relevant traits.”
On its premises in Gedera, the firm has plenty of new initiatives underway, including the recent addition of an advanced processing unit in conjunction with technology company Incotec of the Netherlands. “This is a progressive process that adds value to the seeds we send out, using treatments that prime and upgrade the product,” explains the company’s VIM specialist Gerry Kelman. “The benefit for the grower is that they get much better results from the seeds, as they start from a much better point. Seed price is so high that we want to make sure growers get a uniformity of product from them.”
There are at least four representatives of the original founding families still working for the company, including Zuckerman, explains Kelman. “The vegetable seed business really is the place to be at the moment - demand in the food industry is growing all the time, and that will not change in the near future,” he says.
The company’s innovation and biotechnology department, headed up by Rachel Platin, is constantly on the search for ways to improve fruit quality and metabolic content, whether that be by using new gene pools, DNA markers or other methods. “After a breeder has had an idea, we liaise with the Israeli academic institutes and see what they have on offer to help,” she says.
“At the moment, we are co-ordinating a project into taste, trying to translate the concept into facts and definitions of organoleptic and sensory qualities,” Platin continues. “I am in touch with three UK organisations on this - CCRFA, Sensory Dimensions (from the University of Reading) and the Leatherhead Food Institute. Our idea is to see if we can measure taste, and if so, how? Taste is influenced by the appearance, the aroma and the texture of a product. We are using general consumer panels for our initial assessments, and then we will set up a professional panel who we will test to see how well defined their sense of taste is. The professional panel will then be trained to identify different qualities in tomatoes, peppers and melons.
“This is a long process, which we started last year, and by mid-2008 we hope to have the basic structure of the professional panel in place. The idea is we will be able to use the results as a tool for breeding, to help us make better variety selections,” adds Platin.
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