Apple juice becomes scarce

So far only half of the previous year's quantity pressed

20-Oct-2023

The Association of the German Fruit Juice Industry (VdF) has drawn up a worried interim balance sheet for the current 2023 pressing season. "According to the harvest results currently available to us, only half the volume of apples has been pressed so far compared with the same week in 2022," says VdF managing director Klaus Heitlinger, describing the difficult situation of fruit juice press houses in Germany. In addition, the prices for the apples delivered have risen continuously since the start of the pressing campaign (mid-August).

The current difficult situation is the result of several factors

The fruit crop from orchards, which the association estimated in July to be very low anyway at 300,000 tons, is still falling short of expectations in some places, so that in many places delivery volumes are being compared with the historically low frost year of 2017. Obviously, the harvest capacity of orchard meadows has declined even more than feared due to the three dry summers of recent years.

In addition, an aggravating factor this year is alternance. With alternating strong and weak harvest years, this year it is the turn of the weak harvest year. This is also leading to lower harvest volumes nationwide.

Unfortunately, the dessert fruit market is not providing any relief for fruit juice producers either. Sales of dessert apples on the fresh market are going very well, as there are no surplus stocks of storage apples weighing down the market. For this reason, the sorting out for fruit juice producers from table apples is lower than usual, and prices picked up here as well.

Demand in other processing sectors, such as peeling apple production, is also greater than in previous years, so the entire buying side has to share a much smaller crop.

The majority of the processing campaign will be completed in three weeks, and a significant increase in raw material deliveries is not expected from today's perspective.

Note: This article has been translated using a computer system without human intervention. LUMITOS offers these automatic translations to present a wider range of current news. Since this article has been translated with automatic translation, it is possible that it contains errors in vocabulary, syntax or grammar. The original article in German can be found here.

https://www.yumda.com/en/news/1181837/apple-juice-becomes-scarce.html