12/17/08 Pear Marketing Part 2

Pear Marketing Part 2. I'm Greg Martin with today's Fruit Grower Report. This year's pear harvest was a good one but the work has begun to sell that product in all it's forms to the world market and according to Kevin Moffitt with the Pear Bureau, there are some challenges. One is the buy local idea. MOFFITT: If you take lettuce for example. California and Arizona are responsible for 99% of the lettuce grown in the United States. New Jersey, which is often called the Garden State, grows less than 1% of the lettuce and it's available for less than 2 months out of the year. And certainly they don't grow enough for the 70% of the population that would consider Jersey lettuce local. He thinks the slogan will change to "Buy Locally When In Season." Moffitt thinks the trend to eat healthy will be a big plus in 2009. MOFFITT: There's a lot of schemes out there, nutrition schemes like this Hannaford Guiding Star system where pears rate a respectable 3 out of 3. A newer system just rolled out this fall is the NuVal system. This will strive to rate many items throughout the store on a scale from 1 to 100 with soda pop being about a 1 and where pears rate a respectable 96. Moffitt says even grocery stores will be changing in the future. MOFFITT: The newest trend is actually smaller store footprints. Tesco is a recent entry with their Fresh & Easy concept in the Southwest. These stores are in the 10-thousand sq ft range. Now Safeway is testing a small format including a 20-thousand sq ft store. More tomorrow. That's today's Fruit Grower Report. I'm Greg Martin on the Northwest Ag Information Network.