Egyptian exporters have become the main beneficiaries of rapidly growing demand for frozen strawberries in China in the past few years, according to EastFruit. Egypt has been the leading exporter of frozen berries to China since 2019 and keeps increasing its gap from other supplying countries.
In 2018 Egyptian exporters shipped just slightly more than 3,000 tons of frozen strawberries to China. A few years later, in 2022, Egyptian frozen strawberry exports to China exceeded 31,000 tons, a 10-fold rise over the past five years!
Despite a slight decline in Egyptian exports to China in the first three months of the current year, their volumes are still rather high compared with previous marketing years. Nevertheless, the final results of the 2023 MY will be more obvious in early autumn, as Egyptian frozen strawberry exports usually peak in March-October.
China, the global leader in strawberry production, is currently unable to satisfy its processing industry’s demand for frozen strawberries via domestically produced volumes. That is why frozen strawberry imports have been annually growing in China, while exports demonstrate the opposite trend.
In 2018 China exported above 60,000 tons of frozen strawberries and imported slightly more than 14,000 tons of those berries. By 2022, exports have fallen by a third to 43,000 tons, and imports have almost tripled to 39,000 tons!
Egypt should be mentioned as the second largest exporter of frozen strawberries to China in 2018, with Morocco as the leader (4,700 tons of exports). In 2022, the share of Egypt in China’s total frozen strawberry imports amounted to 80%, imports from Morocco totaled just 1,400 tons, and Chile with 5,900 tons was the second largest supplier of frozen strawberries to China.
Egypt also managed to force out other supplying countries form the Chinese market, such as the USA, Mexico, and Poland, with their cumulative exports to China standing at zero in 2022. Moreover, Egypt is still the only country that exports frozen strawberries to China each month, without seasonal breaks, but, of course, with a clear-cut peak in March-October.
