In many respects the Anjou is a retailer’s dream. Bullet hard and with an extended shelf life to match, it is a dead cert for the conservative supermarket shelves, which have - at least in this category - generally favoured durability over flavour in recent times. For the consumer, however, the pear is far more likely to disappoint. Unless triggered, it will not fully ripen, and the depressingly familiar experience of biting into a hard pear lacking in flavour has rendered the sector static in the UK.
Every one of the top US supermarkets has gone down the route of preconditioning, and the largest of them all, Wal-Mart, has recently come to the party in a big way, ripening pears taken direct from suppliers at its regional distribution centres. The pile-it-high, sell-it-cheap philosophy was getting the pear sector nowhere, but it has experienced significant growth since the fruit was brought out of the dark by an enlightened industry.
Jeff Correa, international marketing director of the Northwest Pear Bureau, admits that this is no preconditioned revolution - he showed FPJ a 70-year-old copy of US newspaper Produce News that featured an article on the very subject. But it is only in the last five years that supermarket chains in the US have grasped the mettle. Ripened pears sell more quickly and in higher volumes than their un-ripened counterparts.
“Putting fruit on shelf that is as close to ideal ripeness has been shown to increase the frequency of purchase in the US,” says Correa. “The typical pear consumer buys our fruit every two to three weeks, but they have been used to buying Anjou and waiting a week for the fruit to ripen. We were therefore missing out on every second shopping trip. But with ripe pears on-shelf, they are eating them in one to two days and coming back more quickly and more often.”
The process is similar to banana ripening and the end results in the US have mirrored the expansion in avocado sales seen in the UK since category saw the light and ripened up its act.
“We have overcome the main perceived obstacle for domestic retailers - that ripe fruit on display will increase shrink,” Correa says. “In fact, the exact opposite has been true in many cases. Retailers should not be asking how long they should keep it, but how long will it take to sell it. Anjou can be ripened and then put back into storage, where the process will stop again. The shelf life holds well and it gives handlers a bit of time to play with. They need to worry less about minimising shrink and think more about optimising sales.”
“For so many years, the industry thought its responsibility was to deliver good, firm, well-coloured pieces of fruit to market - what I like to call the Red Delicious syndrome,” says Neil Galone, vice-president of marketing, at Diamond Fruit Growers in the Hood River Valley. “We forgot about flavour and concentrated on legs to minimise waste.
“Now though, the consumer has become far more discriminating due to the availability of fruit from all over the world. Appearance and shelf life are both still important, but of primary importance has to be flavour.
“Appearance makes the first sale, flavour makes all subsequent sales. It’s like kissing a beautiful woman with bad breath - you’ll still look, but you won’t kiss her again!”
“I don’t know how pears were sold before preconditioning,” says Rainier Fruit’s director of sales Randy Abhold. “Green Anjou is a naturally crisp pear, it doesn’t naturally ripen like other varieties. It is very much like a banana, and if you want to have a good experience with Anjou, it needs to have been treated with ethylene. First, it makes it easier to handle the product through to the retailer’s shelf, and second, once the pears are taken off the shelf, they will ripen like a Bartlett.
“All it takes to convince someone is to get them to eat [a ripened pear]. We used to bring pears into the packhouse and no-one would touch them, now boxes go in minutes,” says Abhold.
A lot of the workers in that packhouse are Mexicans, and Mexico is by far the largest export destination for pears from the US north-west. Its retailers have also begun to take up the gauntlet. “One of the smaller chains was the first to fully ripen all of its pears,” Correa says, “They got a 150 per cent sales rise within two years.” Tests have been carried out in Taiwan and Singapore, and Correa plans to use next year’s Fruit Logistica to talk directly to European retailers and their suppliers about the potential. He has a budget set aside to train and educate the industry in ripening and also would like to see European technical experts in the north-west US researching the process and the way it is being implemented by growers and shippers. “Retailers around the world are obviously wondering what they need to change and how - if they talk to US retailers about their experiences, that’s all good information,” he says.
Abhold agrees: “Our third largest retailer, Kroger, preconditions all of its Anjou and, in taste tests last year, 95 per cent preferred a ripened Anjou over a Bartlett. Kroger promoted its ripened fruit in February last year and the category grew by 38 per cent over the season as a result - they not only turned it around during the promotion, but carried that success through the season.”
Maybe it is time for the old continent to look at not only importing ripened fruit, but to move more of its own fruit through the preconditioning process. “The US market has illustrated how well this process can work for pears and I believe it lends itself very well to Europe too,” says Correa. “It is difficult to get off the ground in the UK as we send such a small volume there. And even though we send 300,000 boxes to Europe, we represent only two per cent of the market. The European pear category is flat in sales terms, but [judging by US results] this would reinvigorate the category and reignite consumer interest in pears. With pears now you have to buy and wait, but consumers want immediate gratification and are used to being given it. This category has not been good at delivering that.”
Stadelman Fruit preconditions around a third of its one million carton throughput, due to customer demand. “It does help when you can walk in as a shipper and say I can double sales in your category for no extra money,” admits general manager Rob Stewart. “If we were just growing for our US customers, we’d probably be preconditioning 80 per cent. The retailer in Europe is different, they generally don’t want the responsibility of any type of preparation for the consumer and they want the supplier to do it for them. Unfortunately, we’re thousands of miles away - and 30 days in transit. It could be done, of course, and I believe in time it will.
“It did take 20 years to convince domestic retailers, but in the last 10 it has gained traction. The costs of ripening are not huge - less than 50 cents a box - and most of that is the labour used. We feel we are bringing value to the consumer by being at the top end of the market and that makes the extra work more than worthwhile.
“It seems so black and white, but the mentality is all wrong. How many strawberries do you think you’d sell if you packed them all green and put them on the shelf like that?” asks Stewart.
A key element to developing the concept is its adoption by producing regions elsewhere, turning ripened pears into a 12-month offer on-shelf, Correa says. “We can’t do this on our own - ripened pears need to be coming from Italy, Belgium and other countries. The pear category needs to wrap its arms around it and extend the availability of preconditioned fruit beyond our six to seven week January and February window before the peak of the southern-hemisphere crop.”
The Anjou market is limited in the UK by the prevalence of Conference, another variety that could benefit from the pre-ripening process. Correa adds: “We’re a gap filler in the UK: that’s the reality. It is a country with a high per capita income, but the intense price competition means that it requires what in the US is regarded as second grade or medium-sized fruit. Markets such as India, for instance, would buy the first-grade fruit and pay better prices. In Europe generally, a lot of the produce you see is not the best available - you are as likely to see premium French apples in Vietnam as you are to see them in France.”
There are a number of different preconditioning methods being used across the US, says Correa, but to ensure consistency throughout the pear offer, the Northwest Pear Bureau is looking to introduce a best practice guide. There are only a handful of ripening rooms customised for pears, with most exponents using either trailers or banana rooms for the job - with success. There is also some inconsistency in the types of boxes being used during the ethylene introduction, with the general consensus seemingly falling on the side of the standard vented eurobox, which optimises airflow.
Blue Star is a Rainier company, which has recently celebrated its centenary on the outskirts of Wenatchee, and is the only packhouse to have invested in ripening rooms specifically for pears. Its facility packs 90 per cent pears - all grown within 10 miles of the packhouse - and 10 per cent Golden Delicious apples. Having used forced-air trailers for ripening for two years, the $1m cost three years ago to install five custom-designed Thermal Tech chambers has proved its worth already, says general manager Jerry Kenoyer. “The trailers were excellent pieces of equipment, but the issues were with loading and unloading and the tying up of space.
“It has added more life to the pear category. First, people wanted preconditioned Bartletts, which was anathema to us, as for 70 years we’d been trying to keep them green. We didn’t really believe in it, but it worked for some customers. But for Anjou, that is a different matter - if you have never eaten a ripe Anjou, you don’t know what the variety is. It is remarkable how uniform it is when ripened,” Kenoyer says.
“From a retail standpoint, there is a pretty good window to work with. It won’t change the colour dramatically, it is perhaps not as aromatic as other varieties, but the beauty is how good it tastes. If you’re not ripening, you’re not even in the game.”
Correa says: “The infrastructure is there - and was already being used for bananas, avocados and mangoes. The only difference between a banana room and a pear room is that you need to be able to bring a pear room down to 0°C. Only a few people have invested in top-of-the-line rooms, but they are seeing the benefits of consumers finally getting the full taste of pears and are prepared to pay higher prices for the ripened fruit.”
There have been ripened pears on UK shelves, and concepts such as ‘eat me, keep me’ are a mainstay, if not yet mainstream. But would a big commitment to ripening work. Abhold is cautiously optimistic. “In the UK, there is still a lot more re-handling than in other markets, and while this process could be done, I’d be curious to know how it would work. But the facts are there, if a retailer really gets behind a product and promotes it, they will do very well,” he says.
“You make your money on selling product, not buying it and this product sold in its traditional way has not been a good performer. Kroger’s sales lifted 38 per cent, and other retailers have seen uplifts of 80-90 per cent: you cannot equate the benefits with the initial costs.”
RAINIER HANDLES THE PRESSURE
Rainier is a family-owned group with seven packhouses in Washington and Oregon. The largest fruit shipper in the northern hemisphere, it packs and ships 17-18 million cases of apples, pears and cherries a year, of which around 4.5m cases will be pears this season. Since the turn of the Millennium, when it shipped around 10m cases of fruit, Rainier has experienced exponential growth as one of the aggressive beneficiaries of local consolidation. The Zirkle family alone grows on 15,000 acres in the north-west.
Director of sales Randy Abhold, pictured, says a change of culture has driven the growth curve upwards. “What has become increasingly important has been good, consistent quality every day,” he says. “The majority of the fruit we sell is our own, which gives us more control over quality than some of our competitors.” Forward planning has been vital. “We didn’t grow it first and then go looking for a market, demand was placed on us to grow it from both existing and new customers.
“We are not the biggest exporter overall, but we are as big as anybody in pears,” he says. “But being the biggest doesn’t mean anything on its own. If you can be the best every day, nobody is going to beat you, and we are very careful to work with customers who understand us as well as we understand them.
“We can ship Anjou pears pretty much year round and provide a consistent quality that not many people can match - and there is enormous pressure on us to maintain that. It is getting tougher, not easier, but that makes us a stronger company.”
EURO CONUNDRUM
Washington and Oregon pear production represent 84 per cent of the national output and around 93 per cent of its exports. A federal marketing order, the Northwest Pear Bureau is its marketing arm and promotes the fruit 36 countries with obligatory levy funding from around 1,600 growers in the region.
The number of sales desks in the sector has dropped by around 50 per cent since a round of consolidation kicked in five years ago, with around 45 packhouses and 20 shipper exporters remaining members of the NPB.
“The consolidation created some uncertainty,” says the Bureau’s international marketing director Jeff Correa. “Companies went from selling 400,000 boxes a year to 750,000 boxes, which meant that many sales people were expected to sell double the amount of pears they had before. That perhaps led to prices being too low for a while, but we have worked through the kinks now.”
The strengthening of the apple market domestically has had a positive knock-on effect. “When apple prices are strong, the pear prices tend to go with them,” says Correa. “And sales desks have more confidence in the price they can sell at.”
In Europe, the three largest markets are Germany, Sweden and the UK & Ireland, although the UK took just 13,900 boxes of fruit last season, which pales into comparison with markets such as Russia, Saudi Arabia, Hong Kong, and a number of South American markets.
Correa says: “The challenge for our growers when they look at Europe is to maximise availability of pears that will attract the highest prices. In the US, the preference is for very clean US first-grade fruit in the 70s, 80s and 90s size range, while Europe prefers a fancy (between first and second class) pear in the 100s to 120s. We don’t grow a lot of fancies, what growers want to grow is first grade and it is difficult for that to compete in the European price structure.”
Stadelman Fruit’s general manager Rob Stewart agrees that the main drawback to exports is pricing and sizing. “If you grow one size for $20 and another for $10, what do you want to grow?” he asks rhetorically. “Of course it hurts our chances of regular business in Europe, but that is what growers are faced with.”
“My challenge, on the other hand,” says Correa, “is to persuade European buyers to take a US grade one, size 90. I think it would sell - if you put a clean, premium product on the shelves against what is there right now, it would stand out. And with the strength of Europe’s currencies, price is not such a big deal at the moment. The retailers are the gatekeepers - I need to find the key that opens that gate to our pears.”
Not everyone is joining in the hunt. “In effect,” says one shipper who did not want to be named, “Europe is saying ‘we want your smallest, cheapest fruit when there is a gap in our market’, which translates as ‘all the fruit you are not trying to grow, we’ll take that’.”
At Duckwall, one of a triumvirate of major packhouses in Odell, Oregon, Rob Peterson, says the UK market is simply not attractive to most growers. “For the volume, I believe it is just not worth the effort when you can go to other destinations and have far fewer problems,” he says. “[The approach] is far too anal in the UK, but that’s not to say it’s a write off for everyone, there is certainly potential there.”
Relationship-building, rather than jumping around markets season-by-season, is the best long-term approach, he adds: “There is a small volume of smaller Anjou this year, which is better for the domestic market than export. Every year is different though and you just have to adjust to your market and keep your customers happy. You might not need them or they might not need you in one season, but the next year they or you will and that should always be at the back of your mind,” Peterson says.
PEAR PAIR ENJOY TOP YEAR
Steve Hunt and Jennifer Euwer are a pear-growing partnership in the Hood River and were finishing their harvest when FPJ came calling. With orchards in the upper elevation of the valley - from 1,100ft up to 2,200ft - they have had a banner year, with record crops in many blocks, if not across the crop as a whole. “This is the cleanest crop I have ever seen, hands down,” says Euwer, whose father is credited with first discovering Red Anjou on his farm down the road.
“There is a good reason why pears are grown here and, with Red Anjou, we have an advantage at higher elevation, as it colours up very well, although we occasionally fall into the smaller size categories,” she says. “It is a tough job to try and guess what will be wanted in 15 years. But we had an opportunity 20 years ago and began to plant, and now we have Red Anjou.”
The pair, who ship their fruit through Diamond, would normally count on an average of around 40 bins an acre, and have carried out constant research on the nutritional requirements for trees planted in the rich volcanic soil. “This year, one block produced 60 bins. It may be a one off and some people will never believe it, but our yields have improved as we have learnt more about treatment of the soil,” says Euwer.
She adds that information is shared far more readily in the sector these days. And the movement en masse to preconditioning fruit, as well as the work on behalf of the industry by the pear bureau has made a big difference. “I believe we are all pretty small in the great scheme of things, so I go with Benjamin Franklin, who said, ‘We must all hang together, or surely we shall all hang separately’,” she says.
DIAMOND IS A GROWER’S BEST FRIEND
Diamond Fruit Growers is the largest shipper dedicated to pears in the northern hemisphere and one of only two packhouses in north-west US that presizes all of its major varieties. “We size and grade every piece of fruit, then put it back into the bins,” says Neil Galone, vice-president of marketing. “Then we can fresh pack out of bins when they come out of storage, having taken specific customer orders for the fruit we know is in the bins. It gives us tremendous flexibility and from a retail standpoint, it also makes our offer a lot more consistent, which is more important than anything.”
DFG ships around two million cartons of pears a year, more than 10 per cent of the industry’s output. Because of its Hood River Valley location, it is also responsible for nearly 25 per cent of the red pear shipments, and rising. “Pears are what we do - most of our competitors are shippers who also do pears, but we put 100 per cent of our effort into one fruit,” says Galone.
Varietal development is risky business, he says: “You grow pears for your heirs. It takes 11 years before trees are in full production so you have to be sure before you make any investment. Red Anjou has sprung up in the Hood River area in the last 20 years, but not much else has made serious inroads. There is varietal development, but it is hard to reach commercial volumes,” he adds.
“We have, however, done a lot of research in this area into Red Anjou and it has shown that the Columbia Red strains are far more consistent than the Gephardt strains. Since four years ago, we have been advising our growers of this and many have pulled out Gephardt orchards in favour of Columbia Red. In five years, we would expect to have more than 300,000 boxes of Red Anjou going through our packhouse.”
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