Not many products in the fresh-fruit sector can offer year-on-year growth of around 20 per cent, so it’s hardly surprising that mangoes are becoming more and more a focus of attention for the retailers.
“There’s huge growth in mangoes,” says Damien Sutherland, Tesco’s buying manager for exotics. “It’s one of the biggest growth areas in fruit at the moment, and it doesn’t seem to be stopping, year on year, it just keeps on getting bigger.”
Certainly one of the reasons for the growth in mangoes has been increased awareness among consumers, driven by the promotional work of the Mango Association.
However, the work retailers have been doing to improve their offer on mangoes for the consumer has been key to the categories success.
On a basic level, most of the retailers are making a varietal shift to offer consumers better-tasting product.
“Consumers prefer smoother fleshed mangoes,” says Leo Muid, exotic fruit buyer with Sainsbury’s. “We’re looking to programme more of that type of mango, and I think most retailers are starting to move down that path.”
So what that means is; its out with the fibrous Tommy Atkins, in with the smoother Keitt and Kent. Not necessarily a bad thing, as Allen Susser wrote in The Great Mango Book: “Due to its poor flavour, Tommy Atkins was rejected for commercial production in Florida for many years.
“However, its other attributes, including colour, disease tolerance, high yield and the tough nature of the tree and fruit eventually outweighed this negative.”
Not really the kind of attributes that encourage consumers however, and the retail sector is working hard to rectify this.
Harvey Sansome, technical manager for Tesco, says: “Tommy Atkins might be colourful, but it’s not best in eating quality. We’re asking a lot of our growers in Brazil to move towards the smoother varieties and they’re realising that if they want to develop the UK market, they need to make that move.”
However, Muid makes the point that it may be difficult to completely abandon Tommy Atkins: “It’s tricky though, as a lot of Tommy Atkins is available from Brazil and you don’t want to lose out on price and promotion opportunities.” So, it remains unlikely that the variety will disappear from shelves when there’s a chance someone might take the opportunity to undercut you.
Along with the change in varieties, size is also becoming an issue, with some retailers noting an increasing trend towards larger fruit.
Muid says: “Consumers seem to be looking for larger sizes, perhaps due to the fact mangoes are becoming a far more regular purchase for people, confidence is higher and people want larger fruit.”
He says the last time Sainsbury’s ran a bogof offer on larger mangoes, it shifted more than half a million fruit in just three weeks.
The customer profile is also changing, according to Colin Tunstall, category manager for the Co-op. “The real growth in the market is coming from the family basket. Mangoes are starting to become a more regular family purchase.”
On the other hand, Tesco’s Sutherland offers a more succinct reason for the preference: “Larger mangoes will always be more popular than medium because there’s a bloody big stone in the middle!”
Despite this however, medium mangoes still continue to sell well, and particularly for Asda, the trend appears to be away from large sizes.
Lee Harper, the retailer’s fruit buyer, says a move to slim down the offer from two SKUs to one, by replacing large and small fruit with just one medium offer, has proved extremely successful.
“We’ve seen sales jump by 25 per cent. I think the medium-sized fruit suits our customer profiles better, the large ones are just too big.”
Sainsbury’s too has experienced success on medium varieties, with sales growing by around 30 per cent, although this has been driven by promotion, says Muid. “There’s been a bit of a glut on medium sizes which has led to a lot of half price promotions and bogofs.”
Promotion is a key driver for mangoes, but Muid urges caution: “We’re starting to see a certain element of deflation in the market, we’ve seen a slight drop in value and this is due to the level of promotion.”
Deflation is also being aided by price competition. As Tesco’s Sutherland says: “We’ll never be beaten on price by Asda.”
Currently Tesco’s average price for a mango is about 88p, which Sutherland claims is the cheapest in the UK.
“We’re looking to bring that price down further,” he says. “With the work we’re doing over the next 18 months on our value chain, that price will come down.”
But price does remain important for a sector like mangoes. While it is enjoying good growth, still only around one in four consumers buy the fruit. A low price point does encourage trial, as Sutherland says: “88p is not a huge risk for consumers to try it.”
A big development on the retail front has been the step change in quality all of the retailers have been making.
As Sainsbury’s Muid says: “A key thing we’re looking to do is get the product right every time. Ripe, or just about ripe, so consumers can have confidence in buying the product that its spot on every time.”
Tesco is also working hard to ensure the fruit quality to the extent where it can guarantee a good mango every time, says Sansome. “We’re really aiming for repeat purchases, we’ve got to keep consumers coming back.
“In the past mangoes have been hard and not ripe and consumers didn’t know how to ripen them, so people simply weren’t coming back for more.”
As a result, Tesco has been working with its suppliers and using a special new near-infra red scanner which can choose fruit which fits the specifications.
“The scanner shows up any imperfections and allows us to ensure, and guarantee, fruit quality,” adds Sansome.
As with any category showing rapid growth, segmentation is starting to appear on the mango fixture. Most retailers have now launched a premium offer.
Asda’s Harvey says: “We’ve just introduced the Extra Special mango from Israel and it’s already selling quite well. Customers are always crying out for more extra special lines with fruit.”
Tesco are also catering to mango specialists with a Finest line. “We’re trying to provide unusual fruit, and we’re offering new and different varieties each time. It’s been going about 12 months now and it’s selling well,” says Sutherland. The retailer has also just launched a giant mango, available for a short period.
Fairtrade and organic are also beginning to gain a presence in the mango category, however limited availability makes it difficult for the retailers to make it a year round offer at the moment.
Overall, the mango scene is looking healthy. Sales are good, consumer interest is high and growing and, for the retailers, it doesn’t get much better than that.
WEALMOOR SPREADS ITS WINGS
If you had the time and inclination to put every mango handled by Wealmoor this year end to end, you’d have to walk from its headquarters in Hayes to Cairo before you laid the last fruit.
While not too many Journal readers will be queuing up to take on that particular challenge, the scale of the UK’s biggest mango importer is obvious from that statement alone.
While it represents just one part of the Wealmoor business, which takes in the entire spectrum of exotics and legumes, expansion in the mango category has been enormous in the last five years, but the company’s expansion driven commercial director Avnish Malde is not finished yet.
He says: “As a business there is so much more for us to go for and do. The mango category is just one example of our work. Some of the work we have done to develop mango merchandising has changed the face of the market.”
The switch from the traditional UK 30x40 trays to 60x40 trays with inners has arguably had the largest effect on the category, as retailers scurry to change their specs to replicate the success that the larger sized trays have enjoyed. “The uplift seen within our customers has been very good,” says Malde. The opportunity to showcase the product in a more attractive manner has worked beyond all expectations and all retailers who have adopted the tray format are giving more SKUs to the fruit.
The obvious implications are that the mango category expands. But what does that mean for suppliers? “We have to make sure that we are delivering more than just product. For instance, there is so much to achieve in flavour. We started introducing specialist mango varieties when we brought in the first Alphonso from India five years ago for Waitrose - it has since been dubbed the ‘King of mangoes’ - and as mangoes develop into being mainstream we have seen a more discerning customer enter the category. The consumer palate has now become accustomed to new mango tastes, which has set us the challenge of securing 12-month availability for a wider range of lines.”
In July, the Journal reported on a new variety introduced by Wealmoor from its own farms in The Gambia. It has just finished its first season with commercial volumes of the as-yet un-named variety that resembles the Israeli Maya.
The variety was developed in close collaboration with its Israeli partners and was sold exclusively in Waitrose in the last week of June and first week of July, before extending its reach in the final two weeks of its debut season.
Volumes will increase to a budgeted 15-20 tonnes on 3.5 to 4 acres in 2005 and with a further 20 acres planted, expectations are for close to the 100t a year in the not too distant future.
In keeping with the search for new and enhanced flavours, it is the taste of the new variety that sets it apart from other speciality mango types, says Malde: “Some of the speciality varieties commonly available from the Indian sub-continent have a very intense, perfumed flavour. This one has a more balanced, rounded taste and will therefore appeal to a wider consumer.”
Wealmoor also grows Kent and Kiett on its west African farms and has a partnership in Senegal. It is the only UK mango importer to own its own farms in the region, which has an ideal climate for production of highly-coloured and distinctively flavoured fruit, Malde says.
“We are investing heavily in varietal development programmes with our growers around the world,” he adds. “Our technical teams spend a lot of time with growers and the level of transparency has risen beyond all recognition.
“There is a phenomenal amount of information exchanged now and we have half a dozen mango growers in The Gambia, Brazil, Israel and Peru with whom we are working particularly closely to achieve a collective aim. You have to have the spread, as you cannot stretch mango seasons too far out of their natural parameters in tropical conditions.
“In these times of rationalisation and intense price competition, this is what the mango business is all about. It is all about being fluid and agile - and agility is not going to come unless you invest huge amounts of time and effort in developing tight and in-depth relationships at source.
“Mangoes are very complex - there are a huge number of varieties and usage possibilities to communicate to the consumer. Ripening is an art in itself. There is a massive amount of work done before the product gets onto the supermarket shelf.
“The values we are seeing on the high street certainly represent extremely good value for money. To look to drive down prices even further would be a great mistake at this stage. There is so much work left to do to get the right messages home, we need to optimise continuity and get the right varieties into the market at the right times.
“The retailers have done a lot to advance this category and in the last five years we have seen airfreighted fruit be reinstalled as an option and a number of new varieties listed. Of course we are looking for supply chain efficiencies, but we must all be careful that we don’t miss the bigger picture of the potential that mangoes still have. We are in danger of driving costs out to the detriment of developing the market in the first place.”
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