Larger fruit this season
Yet, what was produced proved larger than your average piece of carambola. “While we typically grow bigger fruit than the rest of the Florida industry, our fruit probably ran even a bit larger. The smallest we pick is 3.5 inches long which is much larger than the industry standard,” adds Leifermann. “It allows us to institute this minimum size which we use for our 30-count fruit, and we can still offer real value even in the smallest fruit.”
Watching the gap affects pricing
Meanwhile prices dropped slightly on the carambola this past winter season. “Because of the warm winter, we didn’t really have much of a gap—in November and the early part of December, Florida goes through a supply gap where production goes way far down after the summer peak and before the winter peak,” Leifermann says. “But this year’s warm winter took away that gap and overall the industry’s prices were down around 10 per cent.”
Demand slowly climbing
Despite low supply, demand continued to increase on carambola. Along with winter promotion on the fruit in Canada, a market that traditionally receives fruit from Taiwan at this time, Brooks has been working to send its fruit more easily to two sizeable states. “We’ve developed growing, handling and packing protocols in conjunction with the United States Department of Agriculture, the Florida Department of Agriculture and the Texas and California Departments of Agriculture to, when we follow these protocols, ship our fruit to these two states without any treatment for fruit flies,” says Leifermann. This avoids using treatments such as irradiation or cold-water treatments, traditionally used on fruit such as this. “We experimented with cold treatment for about a season and a half and it was too damaging to the fruit and the irradiation works, but it’s not good for all markets,” notes Leifermann. “So we did this with Texas last year and this year we did California and that’s been great.” In addition, Brooks has continued to educate consumers on other ways to eat carambola, notably out of your hand by biting into it. “That’s the result of many decades of marketing and also relies on producing a consistent piece of fruit that eats well,” he says. “So it has good sugars - we don’t pick it too green. Our interest is in capturing and maintaining the consumers’ interest and you can’t do that with sour carambola.”
For more information:
Peter Leifermann
Brooks Tropicals
Tel: +1 305-247-3544
peter@brookstropicals.com
www.brookstropicals.com