very disciplined around our core strategy of growing only the finest varietals that you can regrow at scale and for year-round supply. So, we’re optimistic, and we don’t see why we couldn’t do what we’ve done with blueberries with these other products. What are your medium-to-long-term goals regarding your berry hectarage? You can think about us as having more than 3,000 hectares of our own plantings in production and going into produc- tion. Long term - so seven to 10 years - we plan to poten- tially have 6,000 to 9,000 hectares across our core three berries globally. Would that be all proprietary farms or also in partnerships with other farms? To date it’s almost entirely our own. And we have grown entirely with our own farms. Over time as we see that level of scale, we absolutely will be doing it with partners, and we’ll continue to do it with our own farms. So, we’re not going to change our strategy - we’re going to complement our strategy. What are your plans with the recently announced Fruitist & Paradise joint venture? This JV between Agrovision and Berries Paradise is a sales and marketing partnership for berries — blueberries and
raspberries in particular. And we’re bringing blackber- ries online, too. This partnership is targeting 52-week premium genetics at scale for North American customers entirely grown and controlled by us. This will be the first company that’s fully vertically integrated with premium genetics at scale, year-round across these berries. This is a very long-term partnership. We expect that with the plantings we have made across the Americas and the plantings we have committed to we will be in the top three suppliers of blueberries and raspberries for the North American market. This is really enabled by the fact that we’re founder-led with strategic and committed shareholders. What are the biggest changes you expect to see in the blueberry industry over the next decade? We’re going to see a lot of consolidation. We’re seeing difficulties in the supply chain. It’s more important than ever to be fully vertically integrated at scale. And, having the ability to invest in R&D, in innovation, we see a very different industry a decade from now. We see a dominance of leading microclimates, and we see the industry exiting - for the most part - the old-world microclimates. So, we believe, for example, Argentina will largely be out of the blueberry business. We see Chile as being much stronger in other products than blueberries, though we
42 Vision Magazine
December 2022
Powered by FlippingBook