Supply chain for fresh produce
- Posted by Magda on November 30th, 2006 filed in Food and beverage, Services
Opportunity: Centralization and distribution of the fresh fruits and vegetables offer
It’s been a while now since we keep on talking in the office about how difficult it is to find fresh/organic produce on the Romanian market. Supermarkets carry them, but they don’t always have them. Restaurants sometimes have sometimes don’t have the salad you like. Of course, we analyze and complain about it as we though either the supermarkets do not understand there is a higher demand, or there is no production of such. We even considered opening our own fresh fruit stand or a farm to produce them. But what we uncovered when we had discussions with specialists in the industry was that the market is aware of the demand and is not lacking in produce offer. The bottle neck is the supply chain. Despite the fact that there are a lot of small farmers in most villages they don’t have the necessary means to sell their production. Nor a big supermarket would complicate their business model to search for and contract with hundreds of such small growers.
The opportunity is to build a solid supply chain, more like a postal service and bring the produce from farms to the consumer.
Written by Magda
March 1st, 2007 at 11:48 am
[...] On BusinessIDEAS.ro, we have previously proposed fruit kiosks for people on the run, organic produce stands, and supply chains for fresh produce. “Fruterias” are a similar business that is obviously very successful elsewhere, made possible by good supply chaining. [...]
February 18th, 2009 at 6:18 pm
You need to come to South Africa. We have commission markets where the produce is delivered from the producers, and then sold to wholesalers, retailers and to the informal street vendors.