The Retail View
The Retail View. I'm Greg Martin with today's Fruit Grower Report.
If the farmer is the creator and the consumer is the end user then the store is the middle man. Frank Padilla with Costco Wholesale spent some time recently talking about how they work with the tree fruit industry and organics specifically.
PADILLA: Almost 700 warehouse store as we call them worldwide with about 70% of them in the U.S. but we do operate and sell organics in all the countries that we operate in including Canada, Mexico, the United Kingdom, Japan, Korea, Taiwan, Australia, Spain and someday France. So why organic. Well probably when we started this operation we probably would have told ourselves that with our limited SKU selection we probably never would have sold something like this in the past but what's happened is this is the kind of thing that is starting to resonate with our members
He says that organics are being seen now as a lifestyle and not a trendy thing.
PADILLA: So they're after sustainable farming. They think that if they're buying organic the growers are responsible in farming and will be here for generations to come. It's a very, very tricky thing that at Costco we have a limited selection so that if a grocery store sold 150 cereals, we might have 10. We think that's the best 10 to be selling. We want to do that with our produce items and apples and organics are no exception.
We'll dig into this a little deeper on Monday.
That's today's Fruit Grower Report. I'm Greg Martin on the Ag Information Network of the West.
