In the Colo Fresh packhouse – the closest packhouse along the N1 highway to the port of Cape Town – the citrus season is done. For two months, they burn the candle at both ends, packing night and day, says Erik de Wet, Refresh marketer. They’re happy for a reprieve before the start of stonefruit and then pomegranates.

Citrus packing in the packhouse had been at around the halfway mark of the Western Cape mandarin season when orders came to pivot from the United States to Europe as a result of US trade tariffs on South Africa. “For the United States, we pack 15kg jumble fill cartons. It’s a process that moves pretty quickly, and the fruit is reworked on the other side. For Europe, one has to do 10kg of place packing by hand, and it takes a lot longer. We’ve had to hire more employees and start with night shift earlier.”

Refresh also markets lemons, a line that did very well this season.

© Refresh

“Our grower is very good at what he does”
Starting at the very beginning of January, on a separate packline, butternuts are sized and packed. Refresh is South Africa’s largest butternut exporter, sending around 250 containers every year to the Middle East, Europe, and the UK.

Many grow butternut, a crop to which there is a low barrier to entry. What sets them apart, De Wet says, is their dedication to butternuts: many grow it as a cash crop, but no one else in the Western Cape specializes in butternuts the way of their grower Bernard Conradie does. “Bernard is very good at what he does. By manipulating the sizes, we can put together the puzzle to exactly fit the client’s requirements. It gives us the ability to fill entire containers with just one size, and to do that on a consistent basis.”

What they can export, they do, and the balance – between 1,500 and 2,000 tonnes annually – sent to the Cape Town wholesale market, where the domestic butternut season is a “bloodbath” by the time butternuts grown in Limpopo and North West Province start arriving.

© Refresh

At the moment, with the South African market short on butternuts, it sells for unusually high prices, in the Western Cape, roughly five times the average of R3 or R4 per kilogram during the peak season.

Export prices are much higher, but what brings them down, he remarks, are Spanish growers who store their butternut to dripfeed it into the counterseasonal market.

“As long as there is a Spanish product in the market, even if very little, it drags down the prices. During our export window, every week our buyers tell me that the very last of the Spanish butternuts are arriving, every week they’re expecting the very last of the butternuts.”

© Carolize Jansen | FreshPlaza.comWessel Ferreira, Colo Fresh packhouse manager, with general manager Karel Vryenhoek and Erik de Wet

For more information:
Erik de Wet
Refresh
Email: [email protected]