Fruit freedom has a long way to go.
Author: Zhu Mo.
*: Kuaidaocaijing (ID: kuaidaocaijing).
From 2023 to 2024, the price reduction of fruits will be round after round, and the "fruit freedom" that people can't ask for seems to be becoming a reality.
Whether it is the aristocratic "Sunshine Rose" in the grape, or the favorite cherries of the middle class, and then the strawberries at the end of the year, these expensive fruits that were "unattainable" in the past are now unusual, and they are flying into the homes of ordinary people.
Not long ago, the topic of "strawberry ** big dive" rushed to the hot search, including Hongyan, Tianbao, Ningyu, etc., many varieties of strawberries, ** have fluctuated sharply. Taking Tianbao (milk) strawberries as an example, on December 14, 2023, the average selling price of Beijing Xinfadi Wholesale Market was 155 yuan catty, while the average selling price in the same period in 2022 is 30 yuan catty, ** directly cut in half.
In the 10 billion subsidy channel of an e-commerce platform, a box of 20 Dandong 99 strawberries only needs 1888 yuan, it only takes 27 to buy 3 catties of red strawberries$8. Another cheaper e-commerce platform, no matter what variety of strawberries, the average price starts at 10 yuan, and the number of orders from several head stores has been in units of 100,000.
Screenshot of the e-commerce platform.
Not only Strawberry, but also Cheerilee's situation is also "falling endlessly". According to the same statistics from Beijing's Xinfadi wholesale market, on December 31, 2023, the average selling price of imported cherries in Chile was 60 yuan per catty, and by January 10, the lowest price of cherries was 30 yuan per catty, which is incredible.
Late 2023-early 2024 cherries** Picture: Beijing Xinfadi Wholesale Market.
*On the channel, the price of cherries has also dropped significantly: on the Hema app, all categories of cherries show the "lowest price in 14 days"; On Xiaohongshu, I searched for "cherry price reduction" as the keyword, and all merchants were doing it**, and there was even a ** of 99 yuan and 5 catties.
In addition, the largest fruit citrus in winter has also dropped, among which the sugar orange, which has the largest volume of shipments, has dropped from 20 yuan per kilogram to 12 yuan, a decrease of more than 30%, becoming the main force of winter hot fruits.
I still remember that not long ago, the trend of consumption was still "a monthly salary of more than 10,000 can't afford to eat fruit", and the Internet was filled with a lot of condemnation of "fruit assassins", and now the long-lost price reduction came unexpectedly, which makes people wonder: "Is this the norm of the general trend, or a short-term carnival of the blind law?" ”
The more expensive the fruit is
Who's behind this?
From avocados, kiwi fruits to sunshine roses, from blueberries, durians to cherries, although the C position of Internet celebrity fruits has changed again and again, one thing has never changed, that is, it is too expensive.
Cutting a bunch of red grapes casually costs twenty or thirty yuan, a small handful of cherries costs 30 yuan, and even the commonplace apples and pears are sold for 10 yuan ......According to the National Bureau of Statistics, the per capita disposable income of residents in the country will increase by 5% in 2022, and the real growth will be 29%, and fresh fruit *** 129%。
As the saying goes, Rome was not cast in a day, and the ** of fruit was not formed overnight. From the perspective of external factors, as a foreign product, imported fruits have their own ** genes. For example, the sunshine rose, which is known as the "luxury" of the grape industry, can only be crowned with the title of "sunny king" only from Okayama Prefecture, Japan, and reaches a certain standard.
Look at Chilean cherries again, it is a "squeamish bag", afraid of heat, afraid of dry, afraid of water, afraid of rubbing, in order to keep fresh, to take a plane from the other side of the distant Pacific Ocean, although once as high as 90 yuan catty, it makes sense to trace back to the source.
Moreover, the relationship between supply and demand determines the market, and when the quantity cannot meet the demand, the water will rise. Taking durian as an example, 70% of the domestic durian comes from Thailand, as the main production area of Golden Pillow durian, the maturity of Thai durian has regional rotation, and the flow of one production area enters the market after maturity, while the flow of other production areas is not yet mature, there will be a "shortage period", and then the market will go all the way up.
From the perspective of internal factors, consumers' preferences for fruit quality and appearance, as well as the deviation of planting information guided by consumer behavior, have aggravated the soaring fruit ** to a greater extent.
When the fruit industry moves towards high-quality upgrading, it will inevitably be affected. Take the acquisition process as an example, ripe fruits will be graded according to specifications, fruit diameter, fruit surface and fruit loss, as well as by further defining the hardness, sugar and freshness of the fruit, so as to divide different grades, the higher the grade, the more expensive it is.
Baiguoyuan, the "first fruit chain retail stock" listed on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange, has its own set of fruit standards. It will classify the fruits according to the "four degrees - taste - safety", that is, from the perspective of "sugar acidity, freshness, crispness, tenderness, aroma, and safety", it is divided into four grades: "signboard, grade A, grade B, and grade C", and the good fruits are picked out and sold at a price.
Figure: NetEase Digital Reading.
For example, if it is an A-grade quality crystal Fuji, the price can be as high as 165 yuan catty, which is equivalent to 10 yuan for a crystal Fuji apple weighing about 330g. In the past, as long as you had to eat, now you need to eat well, and the price is to pay more money.
The most important thing is that this grading measure makes the fruit no longer sold in bulk, but adds layers of circulation links, which have to go through multiple channels of acquisition, wholesale and sales, and each link will increase the number of layers of goods, which has caused a situation of "more and more expensive fruits".
Just when people were complaining, thinking that the fruit would be "high-spirited" all the way, the situation had an unexpected twist and turn.
Expensive fruit walked off the altar
Why is it suddenly worth **?
As a big fruit planting country, as well as the "involution" between growers, it has imperceptibly "beaten" the ** of expensive fruits.
As the "handle" of apples, the red and durable "Fuji series" apples have also been all the rage. In 1980, China introduced Red Fuji to Shandong Province, and because the climate and environment of Shandong are extremely suitable for the growth of Red Fuji, the planting area and output of Red Fuji have risen one after another, exceeding more than 3,000 tons at the peak.
Almost every post-80s generation grew up eating Shandong's "inexhaustible" red Fuji, and the more they planted, the rarer varieties will return to the ordinary.
History is always strikingly similar. In 2006, the Japanese-bred Sunshine Rose officially entered China, and Nanjing Agricultural University introduced this grape through the National 948 Project, opening its "Portugal" in China.
In the following ten years, although planting was introduced in various places, the cultivation technology was never up to par. It was not until 2016 that the localized cultivation technology of Sunshine Rose finally matured, and the domestic Sunshine Rose began to expand wildly.
According to incomplete statistics from the Institute of Pomology of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, in 2016, the planting area of Sunshine Rose grapes in China was only tens of thousands of mu, and by 2020, this number has increased to 800,000 mu, and the total planting area of Sunshine Rose is expected to exceed 100 mu. Originally, August to October is the best season to eat Sunshine Rose, so it has achieved almost uninterrupted ** throughout the year.
From the moment Sunshine Rose stepped down from the altar, ** also ushered in the "big dive".。You know, in 2017, a string of 1The retail price of 5 kilograms of Qingwang is close to 1,500 yuan, and the fruit supplier even needs to raise the purchase price to grab a few bunches.
But in the past three years, Sunshine Rose's **has shown a cliff-like**. From 2020 to 2023, the highest wholesale price of Sunshine Rose will drop from 60 yuan to 25 yuan catty, and it is no longer the unattainable "Hermes" in the grape world.
Similarly, the "popular king" strawberry is also the same price reduction path. In the past, strawberries relied on imports, but with the development of domestic greenhouse technology, the light and temperature of strawberry growth have become controllable, and more and more farmers have entered the strawberry planting, and the planting area of strawberries has increased from 78 in 20111,000 hectares "abruptly" rose to 139 in 202197,000 hectares, the largest production scale in the world, accounting for more than one-third of the world's total strawberry production.
Not only that, but today China is also the world's largest producer of blueberries; Avocados have been successfully promoted and planted in many regions of Yunnan, and even durian, the "king of fruits", has quietly entered the ...... of the first fruit-producing period in HainanIt is precisely because of all kinds of "localization" that the Chinese market in 2023 will fall to 799 yuan a box, avocados are stable at more than 30 yuan 4, and they no longer feel so "painful" to eat.
It is precisely because of the exponentially expanded planting area and the vigorous growth of production that the objective law of "scarcity is expensive" has been broken, and the seller's market has become a buyer's market, and it has also ushered in.
However, when the "noble fruits" lined up to walk down the altar, consumers found that things did not seem to be so simple after chopping their hands passionately.
The road from quantitative change to qualitative change
Fruit freedom has a long way to go.
In a way, "fruit freedom" is indeed close at hand.
If the "parity" of sunshine roses and avocados is the result of large-scale cultivation in China, then the price reductions of cherries and durians are due to the credit of China's cross-border logistics.
The complete fresh logistics infrastructure not only reduces storage and transit time, but also further reduces the loss rate. Chilean growers may find it hard to imagine that cherries, just picked today, could be in the hands of Chinese consumers two days later.
On December 3, 2021, with the official opening of the China-Laos Railway, it only takes 3 days for durian to be transported from Thailand to Kunming, China, which is almost catching up with the transportation speed of domestic express delivery, and the transportation cost has been reduced.
February** Dynamic Incentive Plan However, it is worth noting that when production blows out, quality control problems also arise. This summer, while "the decline of sunshine roses" caused heated discussions, the ** about "sunshine roses become cheaper and unpalatable" is also very noisy.
Although it is still large and full, many people complain that the flesh tastes either sweet or sour, and even the hard and crisp flesh becomes soft, even inferior to ordinary grapes.
In fact, it is not an easy task to grow Sunshine Roses with first-class fruits, and it is necessary to ensure that the planting environment and planting technology meet both the standards. In order to save costs, many fruit farmers use inorganic fertilizers such as phosphate fertilizer and potassium fertilizer, which discounts the taste of Sunshine Rose; There are also many fruit farmers who will pick in advance in order to seize the market, but often the grapes are not fully ripe at this time, and the sugar is simply not enough; There are also some fruit farmers who are reluctant to complete the ears and fruits, and only want to increase the yield, so that the Sunshine Rose completely loses its original flavor.
Artificial cultivation is not in place, and Sunshine Rose is just in name.
This also reflects another problem from the side: there are still a lot of fruit planting in China, and the quality of seedlings, cultivation management, industrial processing and other links are not perfect enough, and there is still a long way to go.
The most important thing is that China's fruit industry, in fact, is very dependent and has been "controlled by others" for a long time. In 2018, kiwifruit giant Zespri of New Zealand launched a lawsuit on the grounds that Chinese fruit farmer Gao Haoyu brought back two kinds of rattan of yellow-hearted kiwifruit from a New Zealand farm and sold them to Chinese growers, and finally Gao Haoyu and his wife were sentenced to pay Zespri 15 million New Zealand dollars (about 65.16 million yuan).
In April 2021, Japan implemented the strictest "New Seedling Law" in history, which is used to prevent the flow of Japan's excellent varieties overseas, involving more than 1,900 varieties, and anyone who takes the relevant seedlings out of Japan without permission will be sentenced to up to 10 years in prison.
I don't know, I'm scared. Many of the "Internet celebrity" fruits we eat, such as "Harumi (Baba Mandarin)", Ehime Jelly Orange, "Red Strawberry", and "Meron Melon", are actually developed in Japan. After the seedlings are banned from exporting, the probability of Chinese people eating fruits and encountering "stuck necks" will greatly increase.
Although this "seed war" without gunpowder smoke will force the development of domestic varieties with independent intellectual property rights, the process from "quantitative change" to "qualitative change" obviously depends on time to precipitate.
From this point of view, if the Chinese people want to usher in the real "fruit freedom", they may need to wait patiently.
This article is from the Internet, for reference only, and has no direction and commercial use).
References: 1NetEase Digital Reading "Now Fruits, Why Are They More and More Expensive!" 》
2.The city boundary "only 10 yuan a catty!" Why did this year's strawberries plummet? 》
3.Sanlian Life Weekly "From 300 yuan ** to 10 yuan, why did the Internet celebrity grape "Sunshine Rose" fall to the altar? 》