At the Potato Business Summit, hosted in conjunction with the Potato Expo 2022 in Anaheim, California, Cedric Porter of World Potato Markets and Liam Glennon of World Potato Congress presented the European potato market outlook.
In Europe, the corona virus is still the dominant factor influencing the potato market. It seems this situation will continue for some time to come, said Porter. He said the omicron variant of the virus is lately the reason for restrictive measures concerning some restaurants across Europe.
He said it’s clear that processing usage has recovered in the last few months of 2020. The recovery in exports has been very much concentrated in exports outside the EU, “which is probably a concern for exporters in North America.”
He continued: “We’re now at record levels of nearly two million tons of frozen fries being exported outside the EU by the EU’s main exporting countries. The US has been one of the destinations where EU fries had gone to, and there was a big increase in 2019-20, partly because of the virus disruption, as well as a need in North America for extra fries. That’s continued in the 2021 season, although not to that same sort of growth rate.”
Source: potatonewstoday.com/