With so many apples on offer, consumers could not be blamed for feeling somewhat overwhelmed by the choice that confronts them upon a visit to their preferred supermarket. These days, even if you are a firm fan of a specific type, such as sweet and crunchy or tart and juicy, most of the major retailers will have more than one variety that fits the bill. So how can apple producers hope to make their fruit stand out from the crowd? Branding seems to be today’s hot potato but is it really a worthwhile exercise or is it all just a lot of PR hot air?
Adrian Barlow, chief executive of English Apples and Pears and UK representative for Cameo apples, says branding offers widespread benefits. “Branding - that is the developing of varieties owned by an organisation or individual - does give advantages as compared with products which are freely grown,” says Barlow. “The brand owners can actually look at the size of the market and determine what volumes they can realistically achieve and make sure production is limited so they never enter a situation of oversupply. It gives them the opportunity to develop a following for that brand name and exercise greater control over the quality. For instance, it is not permitted to grow Pink Lady in the UK because the owners believe you can’t get the eating quality north of the Loire Valley. And all this gives the opportunity to have a price premium which is obviously attractive to growers.”
According to Steve Maxwell, marketing director at Worldwide Fruit, the key to the matter is consistency. “There are already a lot of apples out there and people don’t always take chances, but branding enables you to put some strength and guarantees behind a variety,” he says. “With an open released apple, it is a bit more hit and miss. If you buy a packaged good you expect it to be the same every time and we can do the same for Jazz apples.” (Jazz is the Enza-trademarked apple tipped to be the next big name on the UK market).
While branding of fresh produce may have provoked more attention in recent years, the concept has been around in the industry for quite some time, according to Barlow: “Enza and Capespan have been around for a long time and have both been very successful. Why? Because people are reassured that the brands they recognise are going to deliver a guaranteed level of quality.”
Despite the rise in appeal of bi-coloured varieties, according to Martin Dunnett, commercial director at Capespan, the Cape brand is still going strong and the traditional green varieties are still in demand among UK consumers. “There is a very loyal customer base for Granny Smith,” he says. “It is a unique product and in the UK there is a preference for slightly more tart fruit and Granny fits the bill perfectly.”
In terms of market penetration, Golden Delicious has slipped to 13-14 per cent, with Granny Smith down to 11-12 per cent. However, Dunnett expects these figures to remain fairly constant for the foreseeable future, now that grower numbers have been culled to those fully committed to the products.
Dunnett suggests those responsible for marketing Pink Lady must be feeling the pressure. Having started as a high-end niche product, volumes of the product are now reaching significant levels but demand is not yet matching availability, which is detrimental to grower margins, he says. “It is almost in a commodity environment. The cost of promotions is eating into growers’ returns. Unless they can really create a pull for the variety the levy they have will come under more and more scrutiny.”
However, he is quick to highlight that the concept of branding has become rather vague since the advent of Pink Lady. “Pink Lady is not a brand in the sense that Cape is an “umbrella” brand, covering more than one product, it is a trade mark name of a variety.”
Andy Macdonald, of Pink Lady’s UK promoter, Coregeo Ltd, bows down to the Cape brand, as the most prominent name among consumers. However, he claims Pink Lady will never encroach upon commodity apples because of the limited plantings allowed by the brand owners.
Brand awareness is now 60 per cent, sales have shot up by 14 per cent and Macdonald believes Pink Lady is now the third most popular branded apple. This, he puts down in particular to a very striking logo, an attractive website which is now getting 50-60,000 hits per week, the uniqueness of the product and the consumer satisfaction guaranteed by the adherence to rigid specifications. Success has been fairly instant, he says. “When you consider that in 2000, we were only doing 650,000 boxes and we are now doing around two million it is pretty incredible.”
Sundowner is another variety Macdonald is keen to see rise up the market ladder. “It is a sibling of Pink Lady - a deep red, very good eating apple. It is a slow developing, hardier apple than most and it stores very well. Normally apples need to be stored for two to three weeks to get the full flavour, but Sundowner only needs a week to 10 days,” he says.
According to Jerome Sedgwick of the Sundowner Growers Association in South Africa, as well as its attractive red colour and sweet-but-tart flavour, Sundowner stands out particularly because of its robust nature, which makes it far less susceptible to bruising than the average apple.
South African producer, Phil Kilpin, says Sundowner is the most grower-friendly variety. “From a production point of view, its trees bear unlimited fruit. However, this has to be constantly managed, and the trees need to be thinned regularly to ensure the size of the fruit is at its optimum - something that can be very labour intensive.”
South Africa currently exports some 200,000 boxes of Sundowner to the UK and the rest of Europe. However, Sedgwick suggests there is room for development in terms of preference from supermarket buyers, which is vital in order to prevent the expense of promotion from cutting into producers’ profits.
One downside for Sundowner is that its window of availability spans just a few weeks in July and August, making it hard to sustain promotions. However, with French producers soon preparing to harvest their first crops of the variety, the days of year-round availability in northern hemisphere stores are not far away, according to Sedgwick. And producer organisations in South Africa and France are set to embark on a joint strategy to market the fruit.
Sweetie is another variety hoping to cash in on a piece of the branding action. It was released only last month in New Zealand, by Prevar Limited, the joint venture company set up to commercialise new top-fruit varieties engineered by research body, HortResearch. A large, earlier maturing variety, Sweetie is being pitched by its supporters as a potential replacement for Royal Gala and Gala varieties.
Despite his antipathetic feelings towards this increasingly prevalent form of “branding” trademarks, Dunnett emphasises the importance of generic promotional activity, to draw attention to the category, which he suggests has been lacking of late. “It would be true to say that some retailers have made brands less of a centre-piece in their marketing strategy but Cape is dealing with that just as all the other brands will be.” Keeping brands modern and relevant is key to maintaining prominence in the mind of the consumer, he says.
At the same time, it is vital to keep the growers’ wellbeing in mind, he says: “With the costs you incur in promoting, in the modern squeezing of both growers and suppliers, you have got to make sure all marketing and promotion is adding value. With Cape we know that the brand has customer recognition, the question for us is how do we turn that recognition into a real sales advantage.”
Despite volumes being disappointing this year, at WWF Maxwell is still aiming high: “In five years time we want Jazz to have become the next Pink Lady. For that we need substantially larger volumes, and the new plantings in place will put us in a position to do that.” This winter 215,000 Jazz trees are to be planted in the UK, presenting a real opportunity for English growers and putting Jazz on course for international recognition, he claims.
While Maxwell is full of admiration for what the Pink Lady brand has achieved, Jazz has a point in its favour, not shared by the current brand leader, he says. “Pink Lady was a variety that then became a brand. Jazz is completely integrated which means everything - marketing, planting, promotion is all co-ordinated from one source.
Jazz is also set to be the most joined-up variety, he says, with apples produced in both hemispheres, as well as domestically, which will hopefully, prove advantageous, in terms of allegiance from the British public. “With Jazz we are looking to build something worldwide. Other apples come and go as niches but Jazz is looking to be a 12-month variety. At the moment it’s really only available from May to August and then October to February but within 18 months we should be seeing a 12-month supply.”
With this target in place, getting increased volumes on the shelves of the major multiples is of paramount importance. With existing trees approaching maturity, next year should see much more substantial yields, says Maxwell. “It’s always four to five years before you see real volumes.”
Maxwell lists the difficulty in growing Jazz as one of its most prominent assets. “Unlike other apples, Jazz has been developed from a consumer standpoint rather than an agronomic one. Another point in its favour is its uniformity. Pink Lady apples, for example, can differ depending on whether they are grown in France, New Zealand or wherever, but Jazz will deliver a great product every time.”
So, with all of these supported varieties vying for consumer attention, have we yet reached the stage of market saturation? Barlow says not: “Competition is definitely healthy. If we look back at the 1980s, more than 50 per cent of apples on the market were Granny Smith and Golden Delicious, which is real domination. And if you add Cox to that there wasn’t much left over. But since then we have seen Granny and Golden decline enormously as a result of high quality great tasting bi-coloured varieties entering the market. So I think there’s plenty of opportunity for new varieties to perform well on the market.”
However, there are certain specifications, he claims. “Any new variety has got to add something new to what’s already available, to the benefit of consumers and growers, retailers, importers, the whole industry. And then, of course, you really have to be sure to get the consistency so that consumers buying into the brand know that they are going to get the same quality every time.”
Furthermore, even once a certain level of brand recognition has been achieved, continued success can never be assumed. “You have to find support for the brand, and invest in it, make it distinctive enough to achieve a clear identity in the minds of consumers and retailers so they know exactly what they are getting.
And it is imperative that brand owners fully appreciate the properties of their product and pitch it at the correct place in the market, he says. “You have to think realistically. It is probably going to be difficult to convince a Granny Smith buyer to buy Cameo, for example, because, for a start it is the wrong colour and hasn’t got the sharpness of flavour. But it does have the intensity - it has got a wonderful grapefruit-honey taste to it.”
While volumes were disappointing last season, Barlow expects UK yields of Cameo to top 2,000t within a couple of years, which he is keen to see supplemented with increasing imported fruit to maximise availability, within reason. However, there is no room for complacency, he says. “Anybody can sell 1,000t,” he says. “The real test is having 10,000t. “The next step for the Cameo club is to make sure we have enough product but without ever reaching over-production, because although the consumer may benefit short-term in terms of price, it is at the expense of fruit production because producers will ultimately be forced to cut corners and compromise quality.”
Maxwell agrees that brand awareness can never be relied upon, and he advocates being wary of substitution. “People generally only opt for a narrow range of varieties so we have to think about how to get them to try others and actually buy more apples. We want Gala buyers to buy Gala and Jazz. You can’t just rely on those already buying Jazz to buy more, you need to think about enticing others. The apple market is in a state of regeneration. It has already witnessed great changes but there will always be room for new varieties and standards, which is what we want for Jazz.”
Macdonald fully appreciates the transient nature of consumer allegiance. “We have something special which is clearly identifiable and superior,” he says. “I’m not saying that will be forever. You can never be sure how long term it will be when you introduce a new variety. I think there is certainly a place for all new varieties but buyers are having increasing difficulty in deciding what to put on their shelves, so we just have to keep working away to prove that Pink Lady deserves its place. At the same time we need our researchers to keep trying out new varieties. We may have found the holy grail with Pink Lady but maybe not.”
Producers and marketing organisations may not all be singing from the same hymn sheet when it comes to brand definition. But the motivating factor for all must surely be the same: apples are the most popular fruit in the UK, which means for those willing to spend a lot of time and money on an all-singing, all-dancing promotional campaign to put their apple on top, the potential rewards are great indeed.
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