TRADE AND MARKETING Complete cropping marketing programmes provide the Italian market with new élan ‘The best way to make programmes is with new varieties. These are the easiest to keep in hand and provide the market optimally’, is Alberto Roncagli’s belief. this variety all year round. It won’t be very easy, though, to sell the new harvest in Italy this year. The old harvest, which is still available everywhere, is very cheap and the new harvest with grower prices around 50 euro cents is very expensive.’ Potatoes in 5 kg packaging from last year’s harvest were around Bologna on the shelves for the same price as 1.5 kg of new harvest potatoes. In Puglia, we also saw new, not quite firm-skinned Spuntas in a crate in the supermarket. The Auchan supermarket sold them for 79 euro cents per kilogram. We noted that some of the potatoes were showing a lot of green discolouration. The turnover ratio of this variety was, obviously, very low. Considering the price of the packaged potatoes at 2.99 euros for 5 kilograms, that’s not surprising. Potato market is changing ‘It’s high time for a new move in the potato market’, is what Roncagli tells us. ‘The Italian potato market is changing. When Angelino Marmocchi, the father of the current owner Davide started the business in 1956, it was a trading company and a broker in agricultural products. In those days, the emphasis was on potatoes and onions. ‘We’ve invested a great deal during the last ten years. For example, we now work with modern Newtec weighers and Jasa packaging machines. Today, we have an annual turnover of 6,500 tons of potatoes and 4,250 tons of predominantly white onions. We employ eleven people in total’, describes Roncagli. It needs a lot of effort to carry out the working strategy well in programmes, according to the Italian potato man. ‘We’ve developed a special, distinctive packaging to present new varieties to the market in a very special way. What’s more, it requires a great deal of knowledge and experience to hold on to your best growers. It’s difficult to expand the ‘If you use the calcium fertiliser InCa in the correct way, you get stronger tubers during harvesting’, explains Kamal Smid (l) to Antonio Giannuzzi. Potato World 2016 • number 1 25 Pagina 24
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