TRADE AND MARKETING Potato sector keenly anticipates growth of Polish supermarkets ‘It’s important that the volume is so large that you’re an interesting party for your buyers’, Ed van Cleef and Herbert Bos of Hedro Farms knows. weather in recent years. The dry summers in particular are bad for the yield. It’s then that the Netherlands usually catches us up. What we need here are strong, drought-resistant varieties. They need to stop for a bit in hot and dry weather and just carry on growing without problems after rainfall. Yet, cultivation is not the biggest problem here. It’s important that you can store your potatoes long enough. In the harvest period, the supply ex land is much too high and that affects the price. The small Polish growers still store their potatoes in poor-quality storehouses until the early spring. They usually all put them on the market at the same time, which causes another price drop. We have a good storage with space for 8,000 tons of bunk produce.’ Making a difference in the market Another important point to bear in mind in the farm management of Hedro Farms is our ability to stand out. ‘You must do something, somebody else doesn’t do. For example, the smallpackaging activity was very successful in the beginning. We delivered to Lidl for eight years until the more professional packaging businesses arrived. They are a bigger party for the supermarkets. We prefer to leave business with the supermarkets to them, so that we, as professional growers, can focus more on product quality. We’ll only stay active in the wholesale trade market. Most potatoes leave the premises in 10 kilogram bags, but we can also do 5 to 50 kilogram packaging’, Van Cleef explains. ‘Thanks to the increasing influence of the supermarkets, the specialist packaging market is a fast-growing one of which we, as a supplier can also get our share. I hope that it will go in the same direction as in the United Kingdom, where all links in the chain can earn well from the table potato. The only thing is that it won’t go quite as fast as in the UK. Many Polish consumers regard the potatoes in the supermarket much too good’, Artur Szubert, the enthusiastic Polish trader on the local market for Hedro Farms explains to us. ‘They’re used to the unwashed, floury Gala potatoes, which they’re able to buy cheaply in the bazaar. A few years ago, we sold Jelly potatoes to the local markets at the end of the Gala season. Washed, they already looked much nicer than the Gala. The people could hardly believe that they came from here and had only been washed. They just didn’t trust it. That will change, but we’ll need a few years before people have got used to it. You already see that apart from the supermarkets, the bazaars are also starting to ask for more varieties’, Szubert knows. Keep in their own hands All in all, the Dutch growers are happy with the business they have built up so far. ‘We wouldn’t have been able to do that in the Netherlands’, Bos says. ‘We started with 1,200 hectares and we now have 2,800 hectares and fifty permanent staff. Hedro Farms has the cultivation, storage, processing and sales of most crops in their own hands. It’s important that the volume is so large that you’re an interesting party for your buyers. They also want to be able to supply all through the year. Furthermore, we don’t grow on contract. We’re actually selling our products continuously, by which we’re really creating our own pools. We sometimes buy if that’s necessary.’ ● Jaap Delleman The wholesale market is still an important sales channel in Poland today. Potato World 2014 • number 2 37 Pagina 42
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