Chirene Jelbert (right) was working at a blueberry exporter as the industry was taking off in South Africa, present as the first export containers were packed – and also present to see that the conundrum of food waste that is, she says, inevitable to every growing industry.
"The waste part is always the stepchild," Jelbert says, a horticulturalist who has worked as a quality assurance manager, technical manager, and commercial manager at different fruit exporting companies. Often the youngest and the first woman in her position, she found herself preoccupied with questions that others back then didn't deem so pressing. "Sometimes I've been a little bit early for the industry. My career has sort of always been driven into thinking out of the box: how can I find comfort, or how can I find a solution in discomfort?"
She credits former boss and managing director of Idea Fruit, Oliver Wood, for helping her to formulate her ideas on formalising a market for the supposedly unwanted parts of the harvest and "not just dumping everything into the same 10 kilogramme box".
"When I founded C Fruit in 2017, my main focus was seeing if I could uniquely address different customers' needs, and so pack deeper into a crate and add value to what everyone else was just seeing as frozen and dumping as waste when market prices dipped below growers picking costs," she explains. "If clients didn't have waste, they were prepared to pay more, and we could offer more value back to growers. For example, a juice or jam-making company's specifications will differ vastly from a company selling a smoothie mix, or your muffin company, which actually prefers smaller fruit to ensure a minimum amount of blueberries per muffin. Since they're purchasing it at a kilogram price, they would prefer smaller ones."
In C Fruit's first year, they had a grower on the point of dumping a pallet of high-quality raspberries which he couldn't get sold, but Jelbert wouldn't hear of it. "There had to be a market for it, the development process just hadn't happened yet. And what took me a year to sell, now we could sell in a day or two."
Today, their frozen exports exceed their fresh exports in tonnage, and as food purchasing is adapting, the frozen food market is growing, and the trade is running very nicely, she says. Prices for frozen fruit are on an upward curve. C Fruit also supplies South African retailers with fresh berries and fruit mixes.
"South Africa is being recognised as a good supplier. Our growers a export export-focused and our packshed has got all the certification requirements, including GFSI, Siza, Halaal, and Kosher. We've got quite a few containers on order going to clients abroad, mostly Europe. I think internationally, we see the frozen industry actually taking off."
Most popular but scarcest product: Frozen physalis
C Fruit will start importing blueberries from Zimbabwe while the strawberry season has just started in South Africa's North West Province.
"Our most popular product on frozen, which we can never get hold of enough or grow enough, is physalis or goldenberries." In Colombia, companies have had "incredible success" with physalis, she says, and she's consulted them to learn more about the South American fruit. "It's got an incredibly high brix and is used in a lot of food service. For the farmer, though, it's not as profitable because it's expensive to pick: you basically have to handle it twice, first to pick it off the branch and then to unhusk it. Also," she explains, "the price for physalis hasn't grown much for fresh retail, it's become difficult for growers to pursue."
There aren't as many growers growing goldenberries, also called Cape gooseberries, as they need. "So there's this massive amount of food service clients being really unhappy that there's no more of this 'waste'. This is when strategy is key, I seek to understand what solution, whether it be picking cost, transport, packaging formation, scale of a project, pricing, etc., would make the crop financially feasible for all stakeholders in the supply chain?"
After a period of lower availability of fresh physalis in South Africa, retailers have started responding with higher offers. "I think we're making a turn again on physalis, and it should be more stable again in the next two, three years.
Always looking around the corner
She continues: "I think the biggest lesson that I learned from intensely developing the frozen fruit market is that food service has a much longer timeline, and you've got to stay strategically involved in this timeline."
The upcoming yellow kiwi industry's growth in South Africa led her two years ago to start experimenting with Kiwico growers on frozen and dried golden kiwi. "I've had a lot of conversations with the key players in the growing yellow and red kiwi industry. They've seen this cycle in blueberries now, and they don't want to be as unprepared as the industry grows. If we don't develop the market for this fruit now, oversupply will also start to diminish your pricing on other tiers of fruit. We must work together in industries to grow the cycle gradually and already start growing the demand for these products."
Product development in the citrus space interests them, and they've had questions around the possibilities for other categories, like frozen white-fleshed peaches.
"Every year, we are a little bit sold out. "But this helps drive the demand we require to justify the investment requirements for agroprocessing equipment. C Fruit was initially set up to solve problems, but today has become a fully fledged agroprocessor that contracts and packs for various growers."
Jelbert shares that she partnered with Abackus Trust two years ago to set up a facility. The new partners and management team include Simon and Michael Back, who were, she says, the first blueberry growers in South Africa. "This has allowed me to refocus on my passion for unique produce strategies to add value to different supply chains."
She attends all the major fresh fruit expos if she can, or schedules conversations with industry partners to discuss what crops are being undersupplied or oversupplied.
For more information:
Chirene Jelbert
Unique Produce Strategy Consultant
Tel: +27 82 711 2544
Email: [email protected]
Simon Back
C Fruit
Email: [email protected]
https://cfruit.co.za/