Avocado packer and exporter Just Avocados has finalised their ‘Early season pool’ for the 2019-2020 export season, resulting in a healthy return to their supplying growers reflective of their harvest strategies.

Price stability across sizes has been primarily driven by great progress in Asia and specifically Korea taking the majority of the early large fruit, with Thailand and Taiwan having a significant impact in some of our middle and smaller sizes,” says Jacob Darling, who is general manager of sales and marketing for Darling Group and avocado packer and exporter Just Avocados.

Jacob says a combination of good customer channels and marketing activity has helped contribute to 45 per cent of Just Avocados’ export volume being consumed across Asia.

“We put together a range of innovations for Asia from packaging to providing a channel for buyers and consumers to instantly access our story and information about avocados using their smartphones. These aspects have greatly contributed to our point of difference in the marketplace.”

Fruit quality was also improved from the 2018-2019 season.

“The combination of better growing conditions and a focused approach to orchard management and supply chain efficiency in market goes a long way to improving some of our historic challenges, says Jacob.

Just Avocados’ focus for communicating returns has been on the concept of ‘total orchard gate return’.

“As an industry we can’t continue to believe that export per tray orchard gate return is the only element that contributes to probability.

Just Avocados has reviewed their payment reporting to also show grower returns in dollars per hectare.

“We look forward to sitting down with each grower and going through the new payment report, which will assist in understanding what impacts your return and how our model puts growers in the best possible position for orchard probability,” says Jacob.

“While we are an export-based business, we recognise the importance of addressing all events that contribute to grower profit per hectare such as scale, consistency, packout, the application of best practice in genetics, pruning, nutrition and harvest strategy.

“Our early harvest strategy has allowed us to get a significant number of our early growers’ fruit off, which has contributed to high packouts and will assist in increasing consistency of return crop year-on-year.”

Returns from the local market are also an important contributor to total orchard gate return.

“The strategic alignment between Just Avocados and domestic marketer Zeafruit has a positive outcome for growers as we have utilised the strengths of each business to maximise results.

“With an integrated model from growing, packing, distribution and marketing, Just Avocados has led the way in offering a full package for growers from class three returns to export returns.”