Some of Moldova’s canning factories have resumed to accept last year’s apples at the prices they were in autumn 2024. The deliveries in January and February are not very large, only a few dozen tons per day, according to AgroExpert. However, the activity is expected to increase from March onwards.
The Association of Fruit Processors Speranța-Con says that the factories are currently turning one truckload of apples per day into puree, as they do not have enough raw material to resume producing apple juice concentrate. It is hard to say when the full production cycle will be back on track at the plants. In January, the country exported a low amount of apples (around 14,000 tons). This also means that there was not much sorting or discarding of poor-quality apples that would later go to the factories. It is too soon to tell how the apple trade will fare in February. There is potential for boosting the fruit exports, but they will probably not reach their full capacity until March.
Read also: Moldovan apple exports double in January 2024
Experts estimate that there were about 100,000 tons of apples from the 2023 harvest in Moldova’s cold storages at the beginning of February. In theory, this stock of goods could be sold for export or for the domestic “fresh market” in a bit more than four months, before the new marketing season starts. In 2018-2022, it was normal to export 25,000 to 35,000 tons of apples every month from February to May. However, in those years, there were also two occasions when the storages had to send large quantities of dessert apples (tens of thousands of tons) to the factories for processing in the spring. It will be clear by the end of this month which of these scenarios is more likely to happen in 2024.
