It could be a harsh apple season for Polish apple exporters. Not everyone is willing to pay the higher price for the apples, while there’s also a huge demand for apples from the processing industry, says Jakub Krawczyk, export manager for Polish apple exporter Appolonia:
“The harvesting season for Polish apples started earlier, and not every grower started picking apples on the right time. First, the Gala variety was ready for picking in mid-August and the window to pick it was actually very short. Not all growers managed to complete the harvest by that time, and these growers could face some quality consequences. When October started, most of the varieties were about ready for harvesting, almost at the same time, so there was a big rush on the fields. Harvesting is still ongoing, but we see there are big differences in each orchard. For example, some growers have already finished, while others will continue picking apples for two or three more weeks. There weren’t enough workers on the field, but there were also various other reasons that growers were not picking their apples as early as they could have.”
According to Krawczyk, the sizes of the Polish apples will be much larger, FreshPlaza notes. So much so, that many of these will have to be sold for the processing industry. “This season, there are much less volumes and apples are very big in size. It’s a good year for markets who need apples with like 80mm+ size, even with Gala Royal there is lot of that size available. For example, Red Jonaprince or Jonagored have grown with sizes above 100mm. Even if we will pick up everything from the field, many apples will need to be sold as industry apples, because most clients don’t want to take apples larger than 95mm. However, some market chains have changed their specification and there is also a possibility to send bigger apples to them.”
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As the demand for these apples is quite high still, so are the prices, Krawczyk explains: “There is a huge demand for industry apples and peeling apples. That’s why the price for these apples is quite high. We’ve started loading the first Gala Royal in bushels at the start of September and we would like to close the containers loadings season in December or January. Some customers from Asia would like to start loadings from January or February, but we will have to wait and see what the quality of the apples will be like after New Year, and then we’ll decide what to do. Even the shortest connection to Asia is a minimum transit of 45 days, which is quite long for some varieties of apples.”
The increased price of the apples will turn some of the buyers away, Krawczyk thinks. “It’ll be a rather hard season, because the price is generally high and many customers aren’t able to pay so much for the apples. There are also many apples that are cheaper, but their quality is very poor and I wouldn’t risk loading these apples for further destinations. There could be some shortages of availability in Jonagold apples, we predict that this could occur in the second half of the season. Right now, apples aren’t the cheapest fruit on the supermarket shelves. As such, supermarket chains will not do as many promotions with apples, so domestic sales could also turn out to be lower than usual.”
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