TRADE AND MARKETING American small packagers are looking for niches in the market T exas is one of the largest Americans States. The surface is 696,242 square kilometres and is therefore more than 14 times larger than the Netherlands. The oil state, the largest producer of the US, has 26 million inhabitants (America has a total of 313 million inhabitants). With 7,400 hectares, the potato acreage is somewhat less impressive and is just 2 percent of the total American acreage of over 430,000 hectares. If you draw a line through the city of Dallas from north to south, you’ll find that ;around 85 percent of the total American population lives east of that line. If you consider potato growing, then you’ll find that this mainly takes place west of that line, for the most part (Idaho) even miles away from civilisation. As an eastern State, the position of Texas is much more favourable than that of most states and has therefore a logistic advantage. Cary Hoffman and Alan Bradshaw, two entrepreneurs in Texas, are explaining how they gear to this global advantage. Mountain King turns successful marketing into cultivation Fruit and vegetable wholesale trader Mountain King is situated on the industrial estate of Houston. The company packages approx. 136,000 tons of potatoes annually and achieves a total turnover of 100 million dollars. Another 100 million of the company’s total turnover comes from the other fruit and vegetable packaging activities. Owner Cary Hoffman tells me that he is integrated in the chain the other way round. He does that by turning a successful market approach into his own cultivation programme. This means that Hoffman manages to deliver an afFordable and better quality product that meets the wishes of the customer. ‘In the 1980s our company was the first to start selling yellow-fleshed potatoes such as Yukon Gold’, Hoffman comes straight to the point. The major part of the American table potato market consists of all kinds of Russet variants. They have a completely different taste and presentation than the yellow-fleshed potatoes, according to the entrepreneur. ‘These are the varieties the Americans are used to and know how to deal with’, Hoffman explains. ‘However, we are also active in the hotel and catering industry and we know that chefs always like to serve their guests something special, something unusual. You know, Americans often eat out and that means that the hotel and catering industry is a really-big, but also competitive market. So, as a supplier, you need to be different and that’s what we’ve been doing for thirty years now with the yellow-fleshed varieties. It’s mainly the restaurants that are aiming for high quality that order a lot of yellowfleshed potatoes. As this type of potato used to be grown only in small quantities, the price was always high. The growers who supplied us also wanted too much money – and it was also difficult to find suitable growers for these yellow-fleshed potatoes. They preferred to stick to Russets and Reds (redskinned potatoes), because that’s what they were familiar with. At a certain moment, I wondered why the Yukon Gold had to be so much more expensive than any other variety, as the costs of land, irrigation and fertilisation was virtually the same. So I thought, why not grow them ourselves? That’s why we started with a crop on 64 hectares in 1985. This has become quite a bit more now. Today, we grow all kinds of crops (of which one third is potatoes) on a total of 4,000 hectares of agricultural land in the State of Colorado. We went to Colorado because, from the logistics point of view, that State is well-situated for transport to Houston and, at 2,350 metres, is an excellent spot for growing table potatoes. Although there must be enough water for irrigation. Because of the reduced availability of irrigation water, the total acreage in this State has now dropped from 80,000 to 50,000. What we soon found out was that yellow-fleshed potatoes needed a completely different storage regime than the Russets. You can store Russets 6 metres high, start cooling them straightaway, and nothing will happen. You can’t do that with a table potato like the Yukon. After visiting Dutch growers and learning from them, we now don’t store higher than 4 metres. We’ve also introduced a period of wound-healing, and we’re using less air per cubic metre of potatoes than we used to with the Russets’, Hoffman explains. ‘By calling them Mountain King Steakhouse Baker, the consumer suddenly remembers what he can do with these potatoes’, Cary Hoffman explains. Own brand name The transport of potatoes from Colorado is partially by train. This is financially worthwhile, because there are not enough 16 Potato World 2014 • number 4 Pagina 15
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