After a good season with lots of apple exports to India, Demir Fresh Fruits is preparing for a new season. Alper Kerim, owner of the Turkish exporter, states that weather conditions have been near perfect, which he thinks will lead to the best quality he’s seen in a while.
“We’ll start harvesting the new crop around the end of August. First, we’ll start with the Gala variety and other varieties will follow that up shortly after that. I expect harvest will finish in October with the latest varieties. We didn’t face too many challenges on the production side this year. Weather conditions were good, there was sufficient water for apples and we expect very good quality apples this upcoming harvest. This might be the best quality of Turkish apples over the past ten years.”
Just in time for the new harvest of apples, Kerim states that his company has successfully completed a new packhouse as well as new machinery to increase their capacity.
“The largest change we’ve made for the upcoming season, was setting up a new packhouse and a new packing machine. We increased our total storage capacity up to 20,000 tons. In addition to this capacity increase, the most important development is our new packing line system, which is the biggest apple packing system in Turkey. We’re able to double our packing capacity thanks to this new set-up. The new packing machine is a MAFRODA Globalscan G7, which is the latest system of Mafroda. The Globalscan G7 system can help us to upgrade our quality to a much better standard and we will be the leader in terms of quality by far. The new machine will have 28 exits and 6 lines, the packing capacity is 150.000 kg/day. This means we can load almost 50 containers of apples per week.”
By investing for the new season, Demir Fresh Fruits hopes to increase the export volumes significantly this year, Kerim explains: “We finished the previous season with a total 435 containers shipped, but we honestly could have reached 600 containers. Unfortunately, our packing capacity was not enough for us to reach those volumes, but despite that we worked very hard. Our new investment for this upcoming season will help us to reach 1000 containers per season easily. We’re expecting a very good season and solid demand for our DeBa brand apples, because of the quality, packing and service we provide. We are very happy to see our brands are getting more popular day by day, in every country that we supply.”
For more information:
Alper Kerim
Demir Fresh Fruits
Tel: +90 532 514 2080
Email: alper@dff.com.tr
www.dff.com.tr