In recent weeks the sales of Conference have been going quite quickly. "We've been pushing it forward for a while but in recent weeks have been able to catch up a little. The demand from England and Germany is particularly good. Despite this there are still enough pears in the cells and the stock is larger than last year," Erik Kieftenburg of Fruit Noord-Holland expects.
"The pears are generally quite fine and this is resulting in a shortage of the sizes 70-75. Thankfully the pears are of good quality," says Erik. He expect the prices for the Conference (A 55-65 cents, AA 65-73 cents, B/C 43-53 cents) to remain fairly stable for now. "They are slightly further in pear sales in Belgium, but I personally always find the Belgian pears to be of slightly lower quality."
The supply of apples such as Elstar and Boskoop is now reducing and the prices are rising slightly. "If you have excellent Elstar the price of the 75's even rises above the Euro. We haven't had much bother from peel marks and other calamities this year. Thankfully there was no hail in our region. This is different in other parts of the Netherlands if you look at how much hail fell," Erik notes.
"All in all the relative cold weather is very favourable for the top fruit consumption. The supply of the other summer fruit is still limited and the imported pears are also expensive, so we don't have much to fear from them. We will continue for a while, but I expect to be able to move to the new supply seamlessly," concludes Erik.
