Blueberries: A Booming Business In SA

According to a new report by the International Blueberry Organization, South Africa is one of the countries to watch when it comes to global blueberry production, following a surge in export volume in recent years.

COVID-19 has been described as a ‘great accelerator’ of a wide variety of macro-trends, such as business digitalization, e-commerce, and working from home. The same can be said for the growing trend towards healthy eating as the pandemic kicked blueberry consumption into overdrive in both the fresh and frozen categories.

Double-digit sales growth was a common feature for blueberries at the retail level in mature and developing markets, offsetting reductions at foodservice level due to pandemic-related lockdowns.

Globally, the area under blueberry production increased from about 133 000ha in 2016 to 206 000ha in 2020, while production of fresh and frozen fruit reached 1,4 million tons last year.

Blueberries are becoming more commonplace in markets where they were previously seen as a niche product, and greater counter-seasonal availability from burgeoning industries, such as South Africa, Peru, Mexico, and Morocco, has put the fruit on the radar. This has encouraged more Northern Hemisphere growers to plant the crop throughout Europe, not to mention China, where aggressive planting has taken place and imported blueberries are now under greater scrutiny with regards to firmness, size and flavour.

A great shift is occurring, with producers renewing their blueberry farming operations with newer generations of proprietary genetics, focusing on attributes such as yield to make production more profitable at farm level, but also the many fruit attributes that make the berries more appealing to consumers, such as flavor, firmness and visual appeal.