Worldwide Fruit urged retailers to make a firmer commitment to the English top fruit industry at this year's National Fruit Show. The company's chief executive Alasdair Robertson made the call as part of his speech at the show dinner held on October 17, the first day of the two-day event.

'The opportunity exists, in my view, to ask our retail partners to join with us and support us,' he said, 'if we are prepared to demonstrate we are also taking action on our part. We need to demonstrate that we are pulling out the varieties that are not wanted, and thereby not pestering retailers with requests to stock something that is genuinely not sellable for them. Then we have the right to ask them to join with us in setting mutual goals for the next five years.

'Currently, in my view at least, this is not happening. It is something that needs to be done on an industry-wide basis and not just by Worldwide Fruit.' He added that 'meaningful joint targets' with retail partners were needed, as well as ongoing monthly reviews through which promotional contributions could be decided.

However, comments from the WWF boss were met with stony faces when he appeared to criticise the top fruit promotional body English Apples & Pears. 'I was disappointed that this challenge, and what I think is a quite desperate need, wasn't presented at the English launch at Kensington Palace,' said. 'This can still happen under the auspices of EAP. It is important and needs to happen.' Earlier in the year, WWF withdrew its contributions to the EAP dessert apple campaign and channelled funds into 'pressing grower issues' for this season; it has continued to support the Bramley apple campaign. The shortfall will be met with EAP reserves, accumulated during recent seasons.

But Robertson said WWF was still committed to EAP. 'In some quarters, our decision to alter our contributions to EAP this year has been grossly misunderstood and not considered in the light of the actual needs of our members today,' he said.

'For the record, we support EAP, but activities need to be focused, relevant and complementary to the actual needs of the contributing members at any given time. I feel we are a bit too polite and woolly at times. This industry is in real trouble and its needs real action to get it out of trouble.' However, speaking to the Journal at the fruit show, Adrian Barlow, ceo of the promotional committee at EAP, highlighted the success of the campaign to date, and stressed the need to keep the industry working together. 'It is important that there is co-ordination to avoid gluts of fruit and better co-ordination of marketing,' he said. 'I think it would be immensely disadvantageous to the English industry if this co-ordination were to disappear. The great danger is if one of the larger players – any one of them – decides to opt out it creates a divide that prevents satisfactory activity thereafter. Keeping the industry together is critically important.' He added that the size of this season's crop, with supermarket class I product up by 48 per cent on last year, underlined this message. 'We are selling into a marketplace that is fairly congested at the moment,' he said, 'and it is likely that we will need to spend over and above what we did last year in order to achieve sales.' The promotional committee has scheduled a meeting to review the funding situation for the season.

Worldwide Fruit was one of this year's National Fruit Show's major sponsors.

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