With berry sales continuing to thrive, the soft-fruit sector has plenty of reasons to be optimistic, but speak to BerryWorld’s managing director Paul Cole and you get the sense that his, more than most, is a company looking to the future.
These are exciting times for Cole, who joined the international soft-fruit producer’s sales team in March 2004 and worked his way up through the business. Since taking the reins as MD, BerryWorld has taken big steps to grow its budding soft-fruit brand and expand into new sections of the retail landscape.
In the first week of July the Hertfordshire-based company launched branded products, including packs of strawberries and clotted cream, at the Co-op – the first bricks and mortar retailer to join online customers Ocado and Amazon Fresh in stocking its berry brand.
That same week BerryWorld recorded its highest-ever raspberry sales, selling around 300 tonnes in just seven days, compared to the 100t it sold in the corresponding period 12 months earlier.
“Our business is in really good shape,” Cole says at a promotional event at Wimbledon aimed at raising brand awareness and shifting the spotlight from strawberries to raspberries at the tennis championships. “The trend for healthy snacking is driving berry sales at the moment and, alongside our core own-label business, we’re trying to get the BerryWorld name out there.
“BerryWorld is mainly an own-label company,” the former sales director explains. “We supply the major retailers with own-label product, but now we’re starting to sell through our brand as well. Doing events like this is something the company hasn’t really done in the past, but we’ve got to embrace it and do more of it in future.”
The promotion in June saw BerryWorld give away 7,500 80g pots of its premium Sapphire raspberries to tennis fans in the Wimbledon queue, with a photo booth also set up so people could pose as 80s tennis stars. Significantly, it was the first major marketing stunt from the firm since the launch of the BerryWorld brand in January 2016.
The fact that raspberries were chosen over strawberries for the promo may have seemed unusual to some, but given the product’s strong sales growth in recent years, Cole’s logic can’t be faulted. With sales up 13.2 per cent in the year to 21 May, raspberries enjoyed faster sales growth than all but three of FPJ’s recently-published Big 50 Products. And Cole is confident that in raspberries, as well as blueberries, there is plenty of headroom for sales to rise further.
“Around 80 per cent of the population buys into strawberries,” says Cole. “But if you look at raspberries and blueberries, you’ve only got around 50 per cent of the population buying into those products, so there’s a lot of potential.
“Part of our job as marketers is getting people buying into soft fruit. Our sales growth of the next five years is going to come more from raspberries and blueberries because that’s where the market opportunities are.”
Looking to profit from these opportunities, BerryWorld has ramped up production of two proprietary raspberry varieties, BerryGem and BerryJewel, which it launched two years ago. In addition, the company has invested in new raspberry and blueberry plantings in Portugal as it tries to fill its autumn supply gap in the products. “One of the reasons we went to Portugal is that we’re trying to increase our supply during the autumn period,” Cole explains. “Next year we’ll have Portuguese raspberries from October through until June and beyond.”
Having planted 100 hectares in the country last year, Cole admits that such a large investment is “a big risk” but, in keeping with the rest of our conversation, he is confident of success. “Our new varieties work very well there,” he says. “People want soft fruit all year round now so it’s our job to fill gaps in availability, and we’re doing that.”
Operating in the notoriously labour-intensive soft-fruit category, the other big challenge for the company, of course, is to guarantee the adequate post-Brexit supply of migrant workers. Cole says his company has already faced difficulties in recruiting staff since the referendum but he remains positive about the prospect of securing access to sufficient, high-quality seasonal labour beyond March 2019. A recent report by farm business consultants Andersons, which warns that the price of soft fruit could skyrocket if the government doesn’t take action to address an impending labour crisis, has given him renewed confidence that the government is starting to take the issue seriously.
Commenting on Michael Gove’s appointment as Defra secretary in June, Cole says: “There’s optimism there. We’ve got a lot of traction with the government now through the Andersons report and it looks as if MPs have really picked up on it.” The key, he believes, will be to push for a seasonal worker permit scheme through a united industry-wide approach led by the British Summer Fruits trade body.
When I ask Cole what he made of Gove’s predecessor, Andrea Leadsom, he says he didn’t have much contact with her and prefers to focus on the future instead. “We’re moving on,” he says. “I’m a great believer that you’ve got to put the past behind you and focus on the traction we’re getting now. There’s a long way to go, and talk is all well and good, but we seem to be going in the right direction now.”
