"We have Egyptian grapes coming in at the moment," explains Ben Butler from JEM Fruits. "Flame has been fairly steady for a while but prices dropped quite considerably in the last week. Everyone has bought red seedless in punnets this year and there are a lot of them around and people are looking for loose so that market has increased a bit. We start with Egyptian Crimson in week 30-31"
While Flame has been strong, white seedless have just not been a good seller this year again. According to Ben it seems like everyone has a lot of white seedless around and the market is very slow. The demand has dropped as consumers seem to be moving from white seedless varieties to the red seedless ones."
Spain has already started with flame, but Ben expects it will be expensive at the start, but good quality. He has some concerns about the red varieties due to heat, grapes need warm days and cool nights which Spain has not had.
"Egypt will be hard to beat on pricing, and the quality we have had until now has been very good. There are some less good quality grapes around, but these are probably older ones that people have held on to to see if prices would increase."
There is lot of competition on the fruit market just now, pineapples and grapes have been affected by the summer, as well as stone fruit - only oranges and limes are doing well at the moment. This had also been the case for the last month.
For more information:JEMFruits Ltd
Tel:+44 1622689943
Email: ben@jemfruits.com
www.jemfruits.com