By Jacob Darling, Group Sales and Marketing
With the 2018-19 season behind us, Just Avocados continues to focus on its marketing plan for the 2019-20 season. While the industry faced some challenges during the 2018-19 season, we are pleased with our business model’s ability to mitigate many of the external issues that challenged grower returns.
Our focus on international channel development continues for the season ahead. The key markets we plan to target in Asia are China, Thailand, Taiwan and Korea.
Our overarching strategy is to work towards a significant volume of fruit being picked, packed and sold in the early part of the season in Asia.
To handle our growers’ harvest expectations around early volume, we are ensuring market development is being done throughout Asia to support this volume at strong values.
Our goal is to resonate with people through a business to consumer strategy that gives the consumer a good reason to pay a premium for our products in the markets.
We’re also aware of the changing supply dynamic in Australia, including the Chile threat – another factor adding to the importance of our strategy in Asia.
In Australia in the coming season, we will focus on retail and continuing to ensure our customers at this level are looked after with a premium product. Our third-party logistics model through our Australian business JH Leavy & Co remains critical to this, as we want to continue to deliver fresher fruit into the market over other suppliers.
We still recognise the importance of stock age and the effect this has on quality.
Just Avocados continues to believe a profitable orchard is affected by many factors, including pack-outs, quality issues, consistent production and domestic and export returns.
We are moving towards a strategy that minimises growers’ exposure to these factors. High volumes into Asia early, ensuring relevance with our 12-month supply strategy and targeted Australian volumes will stand our team in great stead for the 2019-20 season.