ORLANDO, Fla. — Driscoll’s spoke about recent developments related to blackberries, blueberries and strawberries at the Produce Marketing Association’s Fresh Summit Oct. 19-20.
Steve Trede, director of customer development for the Watsonville, Calif.-based company, said Driscoll’s has expanded its supply of proprietary variety blackberries by more than 20%. The company also showcased some of its new blueberry varieties, with attributes including big size and great flavor, Trede said.
In addition, Trede said Driscoll’s plans to have more organic supply in the coming year.
“Organic demand’s skyrocketing,” Trede said. “Probably one of the neatest things that’s happening is we also announced a pilot of Fair Trade production in Baja, so everything that we ship from Baja in 2019 will be (Fair Trade USA certified).”
Another topic at the booth was the challenge of low prices for California strawberries this last season thanks to ideal production weather and oversupply.
Trede said all companies in the industry faced the same issue and have been working on ways to help support California growers in 2019.
“The farmer didn’t make any money this year, and that was really due to the fact that this was a perfect growing season for strawberries as well as grapes and in many cases for cherries, and they all came on at once and there was no interruption because the weather was perfect,” Trede said. “Too much fruit hit the market at one time, depressed the prices to below production costs, so we’re talking with our retail partners to establish some sort of plan that we can help keep our growers in business.
“What we want to be able to do is figure out a more efficient way to market so that we can streamline some of the costs, and so it involves a lot of things ... ” Trede said. “We have to relevant on price in order to maintain or grow consumption, but at the same time we have to mindful of the costs so that there’s a profit margin at the end of the day.”