Facing cherry industry challenges

The Chilean industry has grown significantly over the last 10  years – from about 40,000 tonnes to 180,000 tonnes of cherries. Chilean cherries are a special market; they can export just about anywhere. Chile exports many other commodities, like apples and citrus fruits, but the main difference between cherries and other Chilean commodities is that they go directly to consumers rather than to re-packers.

As an example of how many cherries Chile exports, about 70% of China’s winter cherries come from Chile. That’s about 230 companies exporting cherries from Chile to China, a very large number of different labels contributing to the Chile cherry brand.

However, this boom is putting increased pressure on the market and its resources, including the people and technology, within it. “That’s why this Global Cherry Summit was especially crucial and beneficial to attend. Our team collaborated with experts outside the TOMRA, Compac and BBC family on how to meet future market demands, improve the Chilean cherry brand, all while continuing to grow the market by 20% per year” – explains Mr. Jacinto Trigo, Regional Director LATAM.

Mr. Trigo shares main challenges, which cherry industry in Chile faces (discussed during Global Cherry Summit):
- Packaging shifting to smaller packages for more frequent smaller purchases. E.g. 500g packs
- Retail rapidly shifting to online e.g. E-commerce expected to reach 20% of China fresh produce sales by 2020
- Occasional low-quality packs negatively impacting Chilean cherry brand
- Current packing capacity can’t handle production peak of Lapins in week 51 of busy years
- Packhouse labor becoming harder to find, keep and coordinate

“Technology will help with those challenges. We’ve taken our next step on this journey with the recent release of Total View to let packhouse simultaneously see the whole surface of the cherry (for previously challenging defects like nose cracks) while maintaining full production speed (to de-risk the Lapin peak and maximize labor efficiency). We can offer optimized solutions for every cherry packer” – ends Mr. Trigo.

For contact:
https://www.tomra.com/en/sorting/food
http://www.compacsort.com/
Rob Pollard
GM & VP Europe
Rob.pollard@tomra.com
+44 7887 750432