“We’re wrapped up in Bartlett pears—that wrapped up about a month ago. Our Green Anjou movement is pretty good. While the season was pretty normal, the green Anjou crop was the shortest crop we’ve had in about five years. We’ve got about another month to go and then we’ll be done with those and Red Anjous,” says Mac Riggan with Chelan Fresh based in Chelan, Wa. “We’re also cleaning up the last of our Bosc pears this week so we’ll be done with them.”
Riggan notes that the season is wrapping up at its usual time and describes the season overall as a typical one. “It wasn’t like apples where we had an unusual amount of small-sized fruit,” he says.
While demand for pears has been even given pricing stabilization, Riggan says pricing has landed in the mid to higher $20s.
New consumers
However Chelan has seen some demand for pears in a new age group of consumers: millennials. “We’re looking at the demographic of who’s buying pears and that age group seems to be moving toward them more than away from them,” he says. “There seems to be a little bit of resurgence in that age group.”
To tap into that potential, Chelan has taken some local initiatives to promote pears—think sending boxes of Boscs to local wineries to pair them with cheese and wine at tasting events. At the same time, it also continues to promote its ripening program. “A ripe Anjou is really what you need to have to sell best,” says Riggan. “That’s key and more and more retailers are embracing that. You have a willingness of shippers to put the investment in, but then they’ve got to be handled well on the other end.”
It’s a bit of movement in a commodity that tends to stay the course in innovation. “There hasn’t been the same amount of innovation in the pear production as there has been in apples,” says Riggan. “There’s not a big swing in pear production and so as long as people are making money off of pears, the industry doesn’t seem forced to reinvent what’s working.”
For more information:
Mac Riggan
Chelan Fresh
Tel: +1 (509) 682-6074
macr@chelanfresh.com
www.chelanfresh.com