Blueberries – The market is still sitting back and waiting for the first major push of the season out of the Coffs Coast. While there has been more volume picked, we know that within the group, harvesting for most growers only occurs every second week. We expect this to pick up every week at the end of the month. Fruit quality has been ok in general, but we are seeing some issues with mould 2-3 days after arrival. We are communicating those problems with the growers and hope to see this improve in the coming weeks as it is isolated to individual growers.
Movement to the 170g punnet – We have had conversations today as to whether we will be moving to 170g punnets next week, however at this stage, we believe the market will remain in a 125g for at least the next two weeks, with production likely to move the following week for 1-2 states (depending on volume).
Far North QLD—This region continues to hit good levels of production and high-quality fruit. The region will experience a cooler start to the week, with a slight increase in temps in both minimum and maximum temperatures at the end of the week. This might slow down production slightly but will have minimal impact.
WA—Premium fruit continues to perform well and has enough demand to hold at the current price point despite the standard 125g punnets moving for less than half the price of 200g. We expect this to continue until we see the next jump in volume out of the northern growing region.
Strawberries— The market continues to fall well behind last year by -20% in volume. It’s hard to know when the jump will occur, and we are seeing more fruit week on week, but this time last year, we saw a lot more availability. Last week, we even noted fruit harvested from Stanthorpe in a major retailer. Outside of the Stanthorpe fruit we saw (which had a lot of white shoulder); fruit quality across the board continues to be good.
Raspberries—Raspberry volumes have dropped significantly over the last week again. We still have a couple of farms going at this point, but we don’t anticipate any major changes in this category in the short to mid-term.
Blackberries—Production has dropped significantly, and similarly to Raspberries, we don’t expect a significant increase until October, which is a little bit earlier than Raspberries.
