The current global business environment, new regulations and market requirements are making it extremely difficult to supply the European Union with fresh produce.
Kenyan producer Sunripe, as well as fellow exporters from the African, Caribbean and Pacific (ACP) countries, is investing heavily in training staff, upgrading systems and technology to ensure compliance and continuity of supply.
In Kenya, Sunripe is a leading producer of prepared and conventional vegetables, fruits and cut flowers. It is part of a group of east African companies that work together to guarantee a year-round supply to their clients.
The company exports just under 7,000 tonnes of fresh produce a year from its production units situated throughout the country, thereby taking advantage of the different climates, soil types and temperatures that Kenya has to offer.
The company’s primary products include various types of beans and edible-podded peas. In addition to these, Sunripe’s product range also comprises corn, chillies, brassicas, alliums, leaf vegetables and fruits such as avocados, pineapples, passion fruit and some mangoes.
Sunripe is also the largest Kenyan producer and exporter of fresh organic vegetables. Flower production and export is also a recent addition to the group.
The company, whose name conjures up the ripening of pineapples in the sun, made its modest beginnings in 1963 as a family business producing Asian vegetables and pineapples for the local market. Over the years business prospered and production flourished.
In 1969 Sunripe started exporting vegetables to the UK and, from 1971, to Germany and the rest of the European continent. In the early 1970s it became a supplier of fresh pineapples for Del Monte Fresh Europe. In the 1980s the company’s range of products expanded and greater emphasis was given to prepacked products. In 1989 the company began exporting premium vegetables to France, which it subsequently extended to other European countries.
Today, the company operates from a state-of-the art processing facility at Nairobi’s Jomo Kenyatta International Airport and supplies 17 countries year-round with produce originating from various parts of Eastern Africa. Its production area covers some 2,000 hectares spread across a dozen EurepGAP certified sites and two BRC Higher Level certified packhouses employing a total of 2,200 people. As of December 2004, the group started operating its own twice-weekly freight service to the UK.
While Sunripe exports its fresh produce to South Africa, Singapore and other Asian countries, the European Union remains its largest market.
“The EU market is very important to us as it accounts for more than 80 per cent of the produce we export,” says Tiku Shah, Sunripe’s managing director. The very fact that Europe accounts for such a large portion of the company’s exports of fresh produce has exacerbated the challenges it faces.
In addition to issues brought about by the rising fuel prices, high freight costs and security charges and inadequate airspace during peak periods, other issues in recent years have led to higher costs associated with exporting to Europe.
These include increasingly stringent EU food safety regulations and market-driven product and processing standards. While Sunripe is certified with major standards such as EurepGAP, BRC, HACCP and Ecocert, among others, it is nonetheless finding it difficult to overcome the extra costs and investments that they entail. “Changing EU regulations affect our ability to export. To meet the changes we have to inject technical and financial resources to help our contract producers and growers meet the required costs and attain compliance. This in effect increases our cost of production significantly and makes some production lines uncompetitive,” claims Shah.
Large producers in Kenya and other ACP countries are usually able to abide by the traceability requirements and the maximum residue limits imposed by the EU’s new regulations on their own.
But smaller ACP producers and exporters that depend on the supply from large numbers of growers are finding it more difficult. Producers have the choice of either dropping growers from their supply base - with obvious if not disastrous consequences on the livelihood of thousands of small growers - or face the monumental task of making sure that every single grower carries out the required changes to comply with the EU’s new regulations.
This is no mean feat for a company like Sunripe which works with about 500 growers, each of which has an average of around 2.5 to 10ha of arable land.
Sunripe decided to continue working with the growers, albeit with a little bit of help.
Well before the EU regulations were due to come into force on January 1 2005, Sunripe called on the joint ACP-EU Pesticides Initiative Programme (PIP) for support.
“PIP support focused on training trainers within our support staff on the safe use of chemicals, Integrated Pest Management, food safety, traceability and crop protocols in order to have a specific grower team responsible for organising, training and increasing growers’ awareness of these requirements. Further support included crop, soil and water analysis as well as chemical residue analysis,” explains Shah.
Do Sunripe and its growers now comply with the EU regulations that recently came into force? Yes for the most part.
“We have been able to carry out most of the required changes. We now comply 100 per cent on traceability, food and environmental safety,” says Shah.
PIP support was significant not only because it helped the company overcome the challenge of complying with the regulations but also because it encouraged growers to produce food under safe conditions, thus benefiting consumers and the environment as well as Sunripe itself.
The next challenge for Sunripe is to acquire EurepGAP certification for its growers, which it hopes to obtain with the help of PIP.
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