You buy with your eyes: Vegetables must taste good on the plate and look good in the supermarket.
Buying behavior
Fresh from the shelf
Whether beans, tomatoes or spinach – our vegetable value chain differs significantly from that for our other established field crops. In this article we explain how customers in the supermarket influence our breeding work.
Fork-sized spinach, tasty tomatoes, seedless melons, or high-quality gourmet beans: All of them are popular in European and American supermarkets. What often ends up just looking like nice packaging is part of a close collaboration, the value chain.
Several elements intermesh: As a seed company, we naturally want to offer the very best products. In the case of vegetables, however, these are not ingredients, such as the sugar from sugarbeet, but the finished product itself that the growers plant and then sell to supermarkets. In vegetable breeding, it is therefore not just agronomic properties such as yield, stability or resistance that have to be heeded. “Our focus is on quality traits that are tailored directly to end consumers,” states Jacco Kaarsemaker, Head of Marketing & Communications Vegetables. “Up to now, we’ve always paid keen attention to what agriculture has needed – now we’re taking an even closer look at the chain from the other side and observing consumer trends.” Customer solutions for the value chain should go beyond agronomics only. We therefore collect insights into consumer needs and desires of today and the future.
“Convenience is an important trend – products have to be practical.”
Jacco Kaarsemaker
Color, shape and practicality are important
And this buying behavior can change quickly. At the moment, for example, the team can see a particular phenomenon for spinach: Fork-sized spinach with small leaves is especially popular as spinach is eaten more and more as salad. It is easy to process, ready to eat and the tender leaves are perceived to be sweeter. “Convenience is an important trend,” says Jacco. “Products have to be practical, like small-leaved spinach, pre-cut beans, non-leaking tomatoes or seedless melons that are easy to handle.” And, of course, the taste has to be right. That is extremely important for vegetables. “You can breed large and high-yielding tomatoes, but if they don’t come out tasting good, that’s a loss for us,” adds Jacco. Appearance also plays an important role: A package of colorful beans attracts a lot of attention in the supermarket and so ends up sooner in the shopping basket. Vegetables also need to be easy to store at home after being bought and keep a long time in the fridge – because waste at the end of the chain should be avoided. Healthy, convenient vegetable concepts, without comprises to taste, are the winners of the future.
Freshness, color and taste influence buying behavior.
Vegetable cultivation takes trends into account, for example spinach with fork-sized leaves.
A solution for the whole year
“It’s also important that the same product is offered all year round,” says Jacco. “Offering one kind of bean and a completely different one the next month doesn’t work. People don’t buy them, the supermarkets make losses and don’t reorder our products.” The Vegetables team already has solutions for a year-round offering, such as Spinach 365. Because spinach is grown all over the world, it is always available, no matter the season, and can therefore be offered all the time in the supermarket. Which spinach is ultimately purchased in turn influences the selection of the varieties we offer our customers. Of course, the focus remains on agriculture. Because with Spinach 365, growers get one thing above all: Reliable and consistent products that they can offer to supermarkets.
“When we ask our growers what they want, we get completely different answers than from packaging companies,” explains Jan Hielco Timmerman, who is responsible for bean sales and manages value chain accounts in Europe and Africa. “Beans are fed through a large tube when they’re packaged. If they’re too long, they get stuck, the machine stops working and everyone loses time.” That is why Jan Hielco accompanies every step in the value chain. He nurtures dialog with growers, packaging companies and supermarkets. “The more we learn, the better we can work together and offer the best product.”
A plan for the future
Of course, the most eye-catching thing would be to be able to write our company’s name on the supermarket packaging. But that is still a utopian idea, as Jacco explains with a smile. Nevertheless, the Vegetables team is already reaping success with many crops, such as the Boston bean. Originally a variety that we grow in Kenya, it has become established as a “gourmet bean.” Word has spread within the value chain that this bean in particular can be used for fine dishes. The upshot: Supermarkets offer Boston beans as a separate bean category, marketed as a high-end product.
Consumer behavior is also at the heart of our new Strategic Planning 2035: Our objective is to become a leader in vegetables. This requires a precise analysis of the entire value chain from both sides. “We want to become a specialist for all our crops, one that not only follows the trends, but also sets them,” says Jacco. “That’s our goal as Freshplorers – to grow with the value chain, day after day.” |
Further questions about the value chain? Please contact:
Jacco Kaarsemaker
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