National Mango Board Unveils Crop Report Application

Orlando, Fla. (July 15, 2010) – The National Mango Board (NMB), recently released its brand new Mango Crop Report Application, an online resource which allows industry members to generate historical reports on mango pricing and volume right from the mango.org website.

The application is conveniently linked from the NMB’s Crop Forecast and History page at www.mango.org/crop. From here, users can build custom reports of either volume or f.o.b. prices by choosing the date range, source countries, entry ports and reporting period by day, week, month or year. The information is available back to January 2005. Reports can be printed directly from the application or exported to an Excel spreadsheet for further analysis.

The information delivered by the Mango Crop Report Application comes directly from the USDA Market News database, which is readily available to anyone via the web. However, that site includes data for all commodities, so it requires the user to click through layers of choices before drilling down to mango-specific data. The Mango Crop Report Application delivers the same mango data with just a few user-friendly clicks.

After extensive testing, the Mango Crop Report Application was unveiled to the mango industry in the June 30 Mango Connection, the NMB’s monthly e-newsletter. Wade Shiba, Managing Member of GM Produce Sales LLC, was one of the application’s beta testers and has already found several beneficial uses upon the application’s unveiling.

“It’s a great tool for using historical data to predict the future. The simplicity and ease of use will enable me to come up with future pricing and ad lids faster and with greater accuracy,” said Shiba. “This application should help the industry move the mango category in the right direction.”

Easy access to this information has been sought after by members of the mango industry, who use the historical data to better plan for the future. According to NMB research director, Leo Ortega, he previously received requests for mango data on a weekly basis from industry members.

“I would have them go to the USDA Market News site and walk them through the steps to find the data. I wanted them to have access to the data at any time, even if I wasn’t available to help them. It became clear that we needed to create our own easy-to-use portal to the same data source”, said Ortega.

The Mango Crop Report Application is just one of many tools and resources available to the mango industry on the board’s mango.org website. Users can also find the mango crop report, which includes the shipping forecast, the mango marketing toolkit, which is packed with graphics, images and mango marketing messages, and many other tools to help boost mango movement.

Source: National Mango Board