Guest article by Diego Castagnasso, a fresh produce and blueberry industry expert. Loud, opinionated, INFORMED! Diego, writes DC’s B-Side’s newsletter as he speaks and speaks as he writes. You can subscribe, under your own peril, to his newsletter here or visit his less fun (for now) website Drip Consulting.

First un UPDATE on the Ports situation in USA...

The strike is “momentarily” on standby… until January at least

The panorama will change again then, because other players will be more affected if the ports stop their activities, like Morocco or Chile.

In any case, we will see the effects of the last few days of the strike and how they altered the market…

Now for a short analysis of New Zealand’s newly opened market, South Korea (K’s B K)

First I would like to thank the Agronometrics team for putting charts on their article…

South Korea Fresh Import Volume By Reporter | Cultivated Conventional

New Zealand Fresh Export Volume By Reporter | Cultivated Conventional

The take from the charts…

Chile is Korea's biggest source of blueberry imports and that Australia is NZ's biggest market BY FAR.

The questions are…

- Will NZ become a problem to Chile’s hegemony in the Korean market?

- Will Australia lose its only blueberry sources to Korea?

- What about Peru?

Thanks to the raw data we can see that if you overlap NZ's Exports and Korea's imports, in the last 18 months, and extrapolate the information to 2025 you can see that the offering curves will overlap shortly. To show you this I use NZ’s export to Australia because is the most relevant.

New Zealand Fresh Export Volume By Reporter | Cultivated Conventional

South Korea Fresh Import Volume By Reporter | Cultivated Conventional

What can we see here…

Chile and NZ overlap during the first months of the year, but based on NZ’s offer to Australia they can complement themselves because in February things change, and “nobody” will bother NZ.

The only player that might bring some noise to this curve is Peru, which might push some fruit into the Korean mix and because of the long production curve, they might overlap with NZ’s offer from February until April without difficulty, and before that, from September to January with Chile’s offer.

Have a Great Week!!!

And remember, if you liked what you read, send it to a friend, if not unsubscribe…

PS: Kiwi’s Blues to Korea… I know is not funny enough but I spent a good half an hour thinking in all the “funny” combinations. Obviously, NONE came through!

PS1: It might be interesting to know if this new NZ's market will generate any movements, political ones I mean, from their Australian neighbors.

Related articles: Current state of the US strawberry market