Page 52 - February2019
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MEXICAN MANGOS
PHOTOS COURTESY OF NATIONAL MANGO BOARD
OFFER HIGH-QUALITY
TREAT FOR RETAILERS
Positioning and robust price points can
be key to leveraging tropical fruit year-round.
MBY CHUCK GREEN
exican mangos are helping to
keep the cash registers at a number of U.S. food retailers humming, according to industry experts.
“ ey sell great,” says Daniel Bell, senior produce and  oral buyer at four-store Grocery Outlet in Emeryville, CA. “ ey arrive in as good a quality state as you can hope for, and we get a good range of sizing.  eir fruit colors up and eats really well.  e Hispanic popula- tion — especially in California — gravitates toward it.”
Also citing the popularity of Mexican
mangos among American consumers, Ronnie Cohen, principal and category manager for mangos at Vision Import Group in Hack- ensack, NJ, says Mexico is the largest coun- try-of-origin supplier to the U.S. market, and its proximity to the border allows fruit to be harvested and shipped at the most optimum stage of maturity. “It provides consumers with a high-quality piece of fruit experience and earns a repeat purchase.”
 e interest in mangos hinges somewhat on the region. According to the National Mango Board, mango dollar growth outpaced total fruit in 2017. Fruit dollars/store/week
grew about 1 percent to $24,658, while staple fruits, such as apples, oranges and melons had declining sales, driving the slow growth of total fruit. Mangos grew 4 percent to $226/ store/week and 5 percent to 238 in volume/ store/week and remain in the No. 20 position in sales and No. 15 in volume.
To that point, Matt Taylor, assistant produce manager at Tadych’s Econofoods, which serves Wisconsin, Michigan and North Dakota with six supermarkets, remarks that, based on his observations, “it’s really mostly about where consumers live and your store’s clientele. If you’re in a college town, where
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