Despite the challenges with the weather in March, the grape season in India has been pretty positive overall, Sagar Deore, director for Indian produce exporter Janki Freshyard Private Limited says: “The Indian table grape season has ended now, as almost every packer has been winding up the packings. This year's table grapes season started late, with peak packing done during February until mid-March. The packing was disturbed during the second half of March, due to the unseasonal rains and hailstorm, which caused packing to slow down. The fruit quality was great and available volume was high this year. If the unseasonal rain hadn’t been there, the volume of table grapes exported from India would have been up by about 15 to 20%, to both traditional markets as well as new markets.”
As volumes are depleting, European importers will soon switch to different origins. Deore states that the campaign in Europe was successful this year. “The current demand for Indian table grapes has slowed down, as Egypt will start their shipments of table grapes in a few weeks. There isn’t much fruit available now for packing. The strongest demand came from the traditional export markets, being Europe, U.K. and Russia. The volume exported was almost similar to last year's quantities. This season we saw that the number of packers was less than usual. The last two seasons in India were very challenging due to the COVID-19 pandemic situation, the high shipping costs and lower or negative returns. I think those were the main reasons many small packers opted to skip packing this year.”
The unseasonal rains and hailstorms did damage a chunk of the Indian production, although the large amount of orchards was unaffected by them, Deore explains: “This year, we see some quality issues in terms of cracked and soft berries to some extent, due to the unseasonal rain and hailstorm during March, but it did not affect the volume in large as such. There were many good orchards available for harvesting, with nominal or no defects, which were exported to overseas markets. There were some orchards which got badly affected by the rain. They were harvested for the domestic market and a large portion also went for the production of raisins.”
For Janki, the focus will now be on other fruits. “I expect more packing to be continued for not more than a week now, as not much fruit is available now for the packing for export markets. We will start working on closing the season now and will also start our preparation for other fruits like pomegranate, mango and banana,” Deore concludes.
For more information:
Sagar Deore
Janki Freshyard Private Limited
Cell/WhatsApp: (+91) 913 024 1585
Email: export@jankiglobalexport.com
www.jankiglobalexport.com