According to EastFruit analysts, prices for industrial apples in Poland are growing almost daily and continue to break records. Considering the sharply revived demand for apple concentrate in the world, which coincided with a decrease in the apple harvest in the EU and in Poland in particular, Polish industrial apple processors are forced to constantly increase prices.
In particular, this week prices have already increased by more than 5% compared to the end of last week and currently average $0.17 US dollars per kg. At the same time, you can get even 19 US cents per kg for apples used for direct-pressed juices of certain varieties. By comparison, a fresh market apple of such a popular variety as Gala costs only 36 cents.
“Usually, fresh apple market is able to offer at least five times, and in some years even 10 times more for good quality apples than processors. However, this year the situation is unprecedented, so the difference is only about 100%,” says Andriy Yarmak, economist at the Investment Centre of the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO).
It is interesting to note that Polish growers still find reasons to be dissatisfied with prices. In particular, they regularly accuse processors of purchasing cheaper apples for processing from Ukraine, where prices are presently indeed much lower than in Poland. Currently, processors in Ukraine pay about 4.4-5.0 UAH/kg for industrial apples, which corresponds to $0.12-0.14 US dollars per kg.
Read also: Russia remains the main market for apples from Poland thanks to “parallel imports”
The topic of Ukraine regularly comes up in discussions of apple prices for processing. In this case, we usually talk about the continuing supply of industrial apples produced in Ukraine to factories in eastern Poland. And also, about imports of Ukrainian apple juice concentrate allegedly from the Ukrainian company TB Fruit to the Polish factories owned by the Austrian companies Dohler and Rauch.
Farmers in Poland are particularly irritated by the fact that the owner of TB Fruit, Taras Barshchovsky, has been put on the wanted list in Poland, and his Polish company has been declared bankrupt, and two of the company’s non-operating factories have been transferred to the management by the state. The growers say that the company did not pay them for the raw materials supplied in previous years, and an attempt to sell the factories to the Dutch company was blocked because the farmers considered the transaction amount to be greatly underestimated. As a result, revenue would not be able to cover debts to suppliers.
Also, Polish farmers regularly complain that prices for apples for processing in neighbouring Germany are much higher than in Poland. However, the real situation is that this year prices both on the fresh market and on the apple market for processing are significantly higher than in previous years. Therefore, apple growers will most likely be able to make very good money.
The use of the site materials is free if there is a direct and open for search engines hyperlink to a specific publication of the East-Fruit.com website.
