While European kiwifruit production was down this season, New Zealand marketer Zespri recorded an uptick in fruit sourced from the continent.

Zespri Europe GM Bert Barmans told www.freshfruitportal.com the company had been receiving more volumes than its ever had this Northern Hemisphere season.

"We feel that more and more customers are starting to appreciate the Zespri quality also in the winter, and more and more people are going with us for 12 months supply, so they can go smoothly between the New Zealand and the European seasons," he said.

"We are making great progress in building relationships with French and Italian growers who are committed to growing to the quality standards we expect, and New Zealand growers deliver too. Because of this we can start to deliver a premium quality 12-month offering to many of our customers."

He expected a smooth transition to New Zealand-sourced kiwifruit in May, with relatively normal green volumes but gold volumes will be down to the impacts of vine disease Psa.

"It's [Psa] particularly affecting gold so their volumes across the whole world have dropped significantly, and that will be the case also this year for Zespri Gold.

"We do have an outlook that our new Zespri SunGold varieties will rise. We have grafted a lot of hectares in the past summer. This year it’s really the dip but from the next year onwards we expect to Zespri's gold volumes start to rise again."

He said Italy and France would follow the same trend of gold grafting and could have a similar trend of new SunGold gold supply, but this would take time as New Zealand started grafting new gold varieties earlier.

www.freshfruitportal.com