Worldwide Fruit is one of the largest fruit marketing companies in the UK, specialising in apples, pears and avocados. It is half owned by Fruition, the producer organisation that represents 30 per cent of the UK’s top-fruit growers, and half by top-fruit specialists Enza New Zealand, the biggest produce company in New Zealand.
“Our job is to facilitate the marketing of our shareholders’ crops,” says chief executive Robert Balicki. “We aim to be profitable, but those profits are dividended back to the growers, so we are a bit different from some other groups because we have producers as our shareholders.”
Over the past 60 years, technology has transformed the way produce is handled and transported from grower to consumer, says Balicki. “Traditionally individual boxes would have been hand loaded on to lorries and then when they got to Covent Garden or the other markets they would have been hand unloaded. All the cold stores would have been hand loaded and most of the fruit would have been stored in either 30lb or 40lb bushels or boxes and those would be hand stacked.
“Palletisation only really started taking place in the late 1970s, so what we had was a very labour-intensive, manual industry. What we’ve got now is a very slick, automated industry and most of the lifting and hard work is done by machines. Mechanisation is probably one of the biggest changes over the 60-year period.”
Worldwide Fruit works with 63 English growers and most of the Enza New Zealand growers, plus growers from all the major fruit-growing areas of the world. “We source apples, pears and avocados wherever they are grown in the world,” says Balicki.
One of the priorities for Worldwide Fruit is developing and marketing new varieties. May saw the launch of the ‘Papple’ in Marks & Spencer, a pear variety that looks like an apple and generated a lot of press coverage.
Looking to the future, Balicki says the company will continue to focus on marketing new varieties. “The important thing is they deliver a point of difference and are better than what is already out there, because it takes quite a lot of investment to get it to a scale where it can command a significant position in the market.”
Balicki also believes the industry will continue to consolidate. “I think that there will be fewer producers overall because individual companies will have got bigger. There will still be companies that will be undertaking the supply of that fruit to the supermarkets, but there will be a more direct supply from the bigger growers to supermarkets.” -
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