A new campaign video has been produced to highlight the quality, sustainability and ethical credentials of South African stone fruit.
The video, which will be promoted via social media channels, sits alongside a new consumer-facing website and a raft of in-store activity as South African Deciduous Fruit Industry body Hortgro aims to help boost sales in the UK market this season.
The five-minute video details Hortgro’s work across a number of transformational and sustainability programmes focused around welfare, training and skills development, as well as its ethical, environmental and sustainability work. Showcasing the beautiful production regions of the Eastern and Western Cape, it underlines what makes South Africa such a desirable source for delicious, high-quality stone fruit.
South Africa exports more than 8,000 tonnes of stone fruit to the UK annually from November to May, backed by a highly efficient supply chain that focuses on quality from tree to shelf. “The goal of all this work is to ensure that we have the optimum eating experience for our top-end customers in the UK,” explained Hortgro’s stone fruit director André Smit. “Our industry lives by the slogan ‘Stone fruit are made for eating, not just for selling’.”
Dovetailing with the trade-focused work is a new consumer-facing website at www.southafricanfruit.co.uk, which has been developed to show the beauty of the South African landscape and how the country’s stone fruit is produced in harmony with the environment. It also features a range of recipe suggestions and competitions, including the chance to win an African safari experience at Port Lympne Hotel & Reserve in Kent.
At the retail level, a wide range of activity is currently underway to promote South African stone fruit to consumers. These include plum punnet-branded shrouds in Morrisons, a promotion on supersweet plums in Tesco, 539,000 branded booklets in plum punnets in Sainsbury’s, a branded uber banner on Ocado.com, and shelf talkers in Waitrose.
