The vibrant Polish apple season is behind us, but preparations for the upcoming seasons are already underway. One Polish apple exporter looks back at the 2018-2019 season with mixed feelings. The record harvest came with quite some challenges.
Wil-Sad is a Polish group of apple producers. Like other Polish apple exporters they had a pretty rough season, says Dominika Koc, export manager for Wil-Sad: “This has been a very bad season for the Polish apples market, both for growers and trading companies. We’re currently still selling apples from the harvest in the autumn of 2018. Last year's production was very large, we had an exceptional harvest. This isn’t only true for Poland though, as apple growers throughout Europe had a big harvest. This means the supply of apples has been abundant, while the demand is unfortunately low. This has resulted in unsatisfactory prices.”
Although there are many factors that growers and exporters have no effect on, Koc says there is one thing that should be done every year and every season: “We should work more on the quality of the fruits we produce. In Poland we have a lot of small family fruit farms, which unfortunately are not able to compete on the market, and this market has changed a lot over the last few years. These days we don’t sell apples in a small local bazaars, but we send them in containers to the other end of the world. The quality of such fruit, firmness and coloration must be impeccable. It seems to some Polish fruit farmers that the supply will create demand and everything we produce, the world will buy from us. Meanwhile the exact opposite is true - we must adapt to the needs of the market, observe what it wants. Unfortunately, the fruit industry has one huge minus; we can’t act in real time and adapt to the needs and requirements of the market from day to day, we often need a few years for it. However, from my observations it seems we are learning very quickly - this is shown, for example, by how we deal with the Russian embargo.”
With an abundance of apples, selling produce to new buyers was hard, Wil-Sad did have their regular markets to fall back on, says Koc: “We export a lot apples to European countries, such as Bulgaria, Hungary, Greece, Slovakia, Czech Republic, Lithuania, UK and Norway, but this year we have sold a lot of our apples to Egypt, India, China and Vietnam as well. Of course, we’re still actively looking for new trade areas. So far we’ve exported about 20,000 tons of apples but we still have some more to sell.”
Looking forward, the 2019-2020 season is already right around the corner. Koc expects the season will be certainly be a different one from this year. “Already at this point, we observe that the crop will be much smaller than in the previous year. Fruit trees in the past year have heavily extended itself, so this year they will surely give it a smaller crop. Additionally, in the last week in Poland we recorded temperatures below zero. The frost damaged some blooms, but at this point we are not able to estimate losses yet,” Koc explains. “Please note that we are really only at the beginning of the vegetation and we don’t know what the next part of the year will look like, what summer will bring. Already at this moment we are struggling in Poland with drought, which also has a negative impact on fruit farms. However, we hope that the next season will be kind to us in terms of sales and prices. Experience suggests that anything can happen and each season is completely different and nothing is predictable. For sure we will be constantly working on the quality of our fruits to stand out on the market, and be able to compete with the already developed brand of Italian or French apples, so that the Polish apple would not be associated only with a low price but also with a very good quality.”
For more information:
Dominica Koc
Wil-Sad
Tel: +48 666 390 296
Email: dominikakoc@wilsad.pl
www.wilsad.pl