We see ongoing domestic market growth driven by consumers moving away, at scale, from UPFs (like sweetened breakfast cereals and sticky sugary cereal bars) in to fresh, healthy fruit. This won’t change – it’s not a fad or a fashion.
The British climate means we are currently an ideal place to grow berries, an advantage which will grow as climate change continues.
There is a large opportunity to grow more crop here in the UK for export, allowing growers to increase their production without pressuring the domestic market, and increasing the range of customers, which can only reduce overall risk.
Things which could really help:
- A new Planning Strategy could be extremely useful if seen through, as we use a lot of infrastructure and planning is currently too slow, too expensive and too inconsistent.
- An EU reset: there is a really significant opportunity for us to export berries to the EU if we can reduce border friction.
- A successor to the Fruit and Vegetable Aid Scheme: it had a lot of advantages (very high level of participation, good funding structure, clear objectives around productivity and environment and inexpensive).
- A reduction in the audit burden: there are simply too many schemes, too many organisations, too much overlap and too much cost.
The future could be very bright for our growers if only government understand our needs and acts, and the NGOs are kept under some sort of control!
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