South Africa: Shaping the taste of the market

FreshPlaza met with Tanith Freeman, product developer at Dutoit in Ceres, for a conversation that ranged from the dispassionate judgment of nectarines to the emotion surrounding apples, why she believes the best is yet to come with red-fleshed apples and how cherries increasingly make sense in South Africa.

Apples are the backbone of Dutoit, but it’s not the category that takes up most of her time. “Most of my time is spent on stonefruit because it’s a number’s game -you want a crop flow from early to late, white and yellow flesh, different flavour profiles, regardless of names and cultivars,” she says. “Taste preferences in nectarines these days tend towards the sweeter side. We are very UK export driven and this reflects their preference which is very similar to that of younger South Africans. The older generation prefer a more balanced taste, like that of September Bright. It has a classic taste, it does well in the orchards, beautiful size – I do have some attachment to the cultivar. When evaluating nectarines I focus on sweet with a bit of acid because if it doesn’t have that acid, the taste can become very flat, especially after storage. Some degree of acid helps to retain the pizzazz of the taste.”

There is always room for improvement to the 52 cultivars currently commercially planted in Dutoit’s stonefruit orchards, she adds, and driven by a combination of market perception and consumer preference, the average lifetime of a peach or nectarine cultivar is about 12 years with very little sentiment attached to a cultivar.

Given the dizzying amounts of nectarines under evaluation, she needs the palate of a parfumier to distinguish between the various selections, and she admits it’s sometimes difficult to keep one’s own taste preference from interfering. As a balance, she takes her brother’s children into the orchard and they confirm what she has picked up as the contemporary preference in a nectarine: sweet with a correcting measure of acid with, ideally, a firm melting texture.

Consequently, development of a new peach or nectarine cultivar is much easier than developing a new apple which demands huge investment in brand development.

Talk turns to Kanzi, with which the company is very pleased. “Initially we only planted it in the Langkloof, and only in specific micro climates, and I have to tell you we’ve never looked back, we’re very happy,” she says. “Last year was only our second marketing season and the Belgian cultivar owners would actually have us plant more than we have currently, but we’re still doing our homework carefully.”

After initial enthusiasm for the Kanzi a measure of disillusionment has crept in among the wider industry; it is not the easiest apple in terms of colour and in the absence of sufficient winter cold, the trees have a tendency towards basal dominance. A small percentage of trees were pulled out, others were topworked. There is still appetite for the cultivar in the broader South African apple industry, she notes, but perhaps at a more measured pace as growers learn what the cultivar demands.

She sees a lot of potential in the pink apple category. “It’s amazing how many fantastic apples there are in trial programmes but a new cultivar needs a champion, an individual who believes in the apple, someone who is an excellent marketer and has a lot of passion and deep pockets. Otherwise it will remain an unknown apple instead of potentially an excellently branded apple like Pink Lady®.”

Dutoit forms part of the IFORED consortium, where Tanith sits on the technical committee that decides upon promising red-fleshed selections. There have been 28 selections offered to members of the consortium, of which Dutoit planted about a third, starting in 2014. The trial block is every year supplemented with new red-fleshed selections. 

The parentage of the selections is unknown, even to the technical committee, so for every selection the wheel has to be re-invented. “You’re blind when you plant them, you have no idea how the tree is going to react to pruning, what its cold requirements are, its post-harvest protocol,” she says. “We have the main license for the IFORED apples in South Africa but we could and have the opportunity to involve other companies too, but before we do, we’d like to be able to give them a manual on the cultivation of these trees.”

Light intensity in the Western Cape is higher than in France and they expect that it is going to be difficult to retain internal colour if these apples are not produced under netting. And yet, she notes, some of the selections that they expected would colour with difficulty, surprised them with its good performance, much better than in France.

“It’s still very much up in the air, we don’t quite understand these apples yet, which is why IFORED has postgraduate students studying all manner of factors that have an influence on internal flesh colour. That has never been studied before, because it was never before necessary. Generally, the redder the flesh, the higher the level of astringent tannins. In the newer selections they’re breeding, the taste is better and less harsh on the palate.”

She has been impressed by IFORED’s consumer testing and specifically how they approach ignorance and bias against red-fleshed apples. “There’s automatic resistance among consumers who believe that these apples are genetically modified but in fact, some of the ancient apples of Kazakhstan had red flesh.”

Over the past few years Dutoit has come to be associated with cherries in South Africa through its Cherry Time brand, which came into existence after the group bought a farm with existing high chill cherry orchards and decided to give cherries an integral place in their portfolio.

“We’re very privileged to have access to cherries from the Zaiger’s Genetics programme and it provides us with a strategic advantage. The low chill requirement of their cherries has been confirmed. We have the main license from Zaiger’s and we have sub-licensed the De Wet Group for the northern provinces of South Africa, where they produce cherries in partnership with ZZ2.”

Dutoit employs ten to twelve new generation cultivars for a cherry season that starts around week 42 in the Nuy Valley, with its 200mm of rainfall a year, and then moves over to a number of farms in the Koue Bokkeveld, ending around Christmas or New Year at Nooitgedacht, their original cherry orchards where they’re supplementing the high chill cherries with new generation Zaiger cultivars.

In cold areas, cherries can use as little as half the amount of water that apples – especially late cultivars – need.

It’s a new branch to their business and until three years ago, all cherries were for local consumption. In fact, the domestic market still takes a significant percentage of their cherries, with the balance exported to the UK and Europe.

“This past season our harvest started 14 days later while Chile was two or three weeks earlier, plus their volumes are growing, so we met each other in the marketplace which wasn’t so easy,” she says. “South Africa is definitely known for its quality and taste (on stonefruit too), also because our shipping period is only about 14 days, which gives us an advantage.” While the UK market likes bi-coloured cherries, Dutoit isn’t completely sold on this category of cherry that easily shows bruises, and rather focuses on the classic gleaming dark fruit.

Zaiger’s Genetics has recently agreed to Dutoit’s request that a new cherry variety, currently under semi-commercial evaluation, be named after the late Jan Eksteen, former cherry production manager on the Nooitgedacht farm and pioneer of Dutoit’s cherry project, and the cultivar is now known as Royal Jan.

For more information:

Tanith Freeman

Tel: +27 23 312 3136

Email: Tanith@dutoit.com