Every year growers’ body Hortgro selects its South African Stonefruit Retailer of the Year, an award that honours the supermarket that has contributed the most to the season.
This year’s winner is Tesco, with Hortgro explaining that the retailer achieved the most consistent results throughout the season and carried out activities such as on-pack promotions, online activity and head office sampling, including featuring South African stonefruit on its canteen menu.
Following the win, FPJ caught up with Tesco stonefruit, cherry and topfruit buying manager Joe Baines to find out how the retailer is innovating in the category.
How important is South Africa as a source of stonefruit to Tesco?
Joe Baines: Right the way throughout fruit, but particularly on stonefruit, South Africa is a key part of our supply. It’s the largest sourcing region we have in our supply base in the southern hemisphere, and that’s grown in importance in the past few years. Part of the thing that has influenced that is the way we’ve structured our tiering, so what we’ve done is introduce a ‘Core’ tier to our range so now we have something in the middle that has allowed us to get a lot closer to the varieties that are coming into the range. What that means is we can be a little bit more prescriptive in exactly where those varieties sit in terms of the tiering and give customers a more consistent eat – it’s not fully ripened but it’s a bit closer to being ready to eat. By introducing another tier we’ve been able to plot out when the varieties are best for eating. So you’ll see Tesco Core plums, Suntrail plums and our Supersweet plums, for example. For the growers it’s also been a great opportunity to take that mapping of the varieties and build a varietal plan across the year.
Is that particularly important in stonefruit, where there are so many different varieties?
JB: There are hundreds of varieties in stonefruit, but we can manage it because we’ve had a consistent supply base for a number of seasons, we’ve been able to look at the data, and we’ve got a great technical team for our benchmarking process and weekly sampling programme. So we can map out how a variety is eating in any given season and establish what’s the best time to have it available in store, and where it sits best within the tiering.
Is your approach bringing more returning customers?
JB: I believe so. We’ve seen a growth in the Supersweet ripened product, and we’ve seen it through the Core range too. The Core range is never going to do the volume you see through the full ripen-at-home range, but it’s a great way of giving something to customers that they weren’t getting before in that entry product.
How wide is your stonefruit range?
JB: It’s typically structured around the three tiers. We do have a large range, and it’s important for us to be able to introduce new things into the category. There’s been a lot of great work at source on varietal development, and if you look across the southern hemisphere, South Africa as a region has done a lot of that. There are hundreds of different varieties of plums, and South Africa has done a great job of understanding what each one does. There’s so much NPD, and we can find space for some speciality products. For example, we’ve seen some great work in apricots, which previously had quite a short window in the southern hemisphere. Some of the development that’s been done has been extending that season, and bringing in some higher Brix, very sweet, and blushed fruit. The red apricot has been a real development in bringing the category forward.
What other lines have been doing well?
JB: Flavor King plums are not new, but they have been a huge part of our range and that’s purely focused on South Africa. We’ve identified it as the best plum that you’d eat across the year and we’ve tried to get behind that and get customers buying into it.
How are you working with your key suppliers, and in particular DPS?
JB: We have a number of suppliers, but DPS is a big part of what we do. The DPS relationship, and the structure of that business, is really an extension of the Tesco team, in the sense that it’s not adding complication to the business, it’s allowing us to work more effectively with the growers at source.
Are you seeing South Africa as growing in importance as a cherry supplier too?
JB: I think cherries are a big opportunity for South Africa, particularly when you take into account the fact that we in the UK significantly overindex as a market in stonefruit as a whole, but there hasn’t traditionally been that same volume in cherries. It provides a great opportunity for continuity as we transition between seasons, so I’m hoping that if the focus continues at source on growing cherries, it should mean great things for the customer in store – better availability of fruit and a more consistent supply.
What initiatives have you put in place that have helped you win this award?
JB: It really comes back to the relationships we’ve built with growers. The way we’ve structured ourselves to have that link to growers means we are very close to them. They understand our business, we understand what they bring to the table for our supply, and we are talking throughout the year. We’ve tried to promote a two-way conversation between the growers, and it does lead back into the way we’ve structured ourselves as a direct model. That really does bring benefits. And the other thing is our team on the ground at source. We have a Tesco team, as well as an extended team through our suppliers, who are at source giving us that face-to-face interaction with the growers. It’s not a new thing, but stonefruit changes incredibly quickly and dynamically throughout the season. You have to be aware of what’s happening as it happens.
Have you actively promoted South African stonefruit?
JB: In terms of South Africa as a source of our supply, we’ve done on-pack offers, online activity and banners, as well as things for shoppers in store. More recently the focus has moved to some of the more topline Tesco initiatives that we are looking to promote, so that’s been some of the quality messages through to some of the work we’ve done around packaging recycling.
