20 Mar 2025 The outlook for fresh fruit and vegetables

If you’re in the fresh produce business, you’d think it reasonable to conclude: “right time, right place”! Not so fast, asserts  Prof David Hughes & Miguel Flavián…

Around the globe, consumers put “eating more healthily” pretty much at the top of their “To Do” list for 2025 and it’s for good reason as, increasingly, the majority of the population are as round as puddings.

Prestigious medical journal The Lancet forecasts that more than half of adults and one-third of children worldwide will be overweight or obese by 2050. Yet, eating healthier is easy to say and, clearly, difficult to do.

Eating more fresh fruit & veg. would be a good start. And that’s exactly what people aren’t doing! What’s the story?

Take higher income countries, across the EU, UK, USA, New Zealand and Australia, longer term per capita fresh produce consumption has trended downwards – although market volumes may have increased driven by increases in population.

Economic downturns are not a friend of the fresh produce industry and the current “cost-of-living crisis” is a case in point. In regular times, fruit and vegetable consumption by lower income urban families is significantly less than in better off families. When the purse is pinched, this is simply accentuated.

Through the past few decades, cost per calorie of “value”, albeit unhealthy foods, such as some cookies, cream cakes, skimpily covered pizzas have become substantially lower than healthy foods such as fruit & veg. and they provide convenient, low-cost meal solutions and assuage hunger whereas salads, cabbage and apples don’t!

Most Western countries are far from achieving anywhere near their 5-a-Day F&V targets (exceptions being Greece, Belgium, Italy, Portugal, and Poland) and there’s been a pervasive drift, across most continents, towards an American-style diet, i.e. one characterised by a high proportion of the controversially defined Ultra Processed Foods (UPF).

By the bye, females are more fresh produce friendly than males, particularly if they have small children (and the urban myth is that a Glaswegian male is more likely to be seen doing needlepoint than eating fresh fruit!).

So, do we just need to lower prices to increase consumption of nutritious fresh fruit & veg? No and, fresh produce growers, park your anger for the moment at the thought of doing such!

A study in point

Here’s a mini case study on the UK fruit market. Keep in mind that this market is largely serviced by imports – 56% from outside Europe, 28% EU, and a modest 16% home-produced. Over the past 15 years, per capita fresh fruit consumption has seen a tiny increase (3%) and is about 40kg/cap. From 2010 to 2024:

• Total fresh fruit retail market value increased from £4.1bn to £7.2bn and volume from 2.47m to 2.8m tonnes while UK population increased from 62.8m to 69.1m;
• In volume terms, bananas continue to be the UK’s favourite fruit, followed by apples, and citrus but all three have slipped in the consumer’s affection, whereas the composite category berries have close to doubled their share, tropical fruit have advanced significantly and grapes have edged forward.
  
  Pear volume share of the market has nigh on halved (with the worrisome thought that, given the demographic profile of a typical pear eater, every time one sees a hearse go by, there goes another pear consumer!);
• Is price driving consumers’ choice of fruit category? Perhaps surprisingly, NO! Fresh berries have a retail price point/kg. some our times that of apples and pears, and eight times of bananas, yet from 2010 to 2024, fresh berries have increased their value share of the retail fruit bowl from 17% to 29% of total.
  
  In fact, they look on course to taking a full one-third of retail fresh fruit sales by decade end, with blueberries leading the charge.
• Bananas, at £0.99/kg, are essentially a “free good” and have seen less than a 10% increase in retail price over the 15-year period, whereas average retail apples prices rose 47% from £1.45 to 2.13/kg and berries by 48% from £5.71 to £8.47/kg.
  
  Do such increases compensate fruit growers for input cost increases? Far from it. For berries, labour costs account for around 50% of total costs and minimum wages have doubled from 2010 to 2025;
• The UK is an intensely price competitive market with supermarket own label products dominating. The two principal hard discounters – Aldi and Lidl – have had huge success in expanding fruit value market share from 6% to 22% at the expense of traditional supermarkets and the dwindling independent trade ensuring inexorable downward pressure on retail F&V prices;
• Low although prices may be, there’s positive news for the UK fruit industry in that retail fresh fruit market volumes peaked in the tragic home-incarcerated Covid years of 2020 and 2021, then declined in 2022 when we were “released” but recovered in 2024 to close at the previous peak levels;
• Of course, consumers have other choices than just fresh F&V and, particularly for vegetables, in the UK the Covid period saw a boost in frozen purchases driven by its longer shelf life, perceived convenience, less waste than fresh, improvement in consumers’ perception of the nutritional quality of frozen produce, and the relative price competitiveness of supermarket branded frozen vegetables.
• Best keep an eye on which veg. will follow the lead of frozen peas and French fries. Chilled ready mashed potatoes are becoming a routine purchase for many households and, looking to the future, frozen chopped onions and garlic look likely candidates for sales growth.
  
  Constraints to the expansion of frozen include availability of freezer space in the home, and concerns about “additives” in frozen products.

The success of relatively pricey fresh berries

They’re perceived as a treat (and even in stringent economic times, who doesn’t need a treat?); loved by children; crucially, they’re convenient (you don’t have to peel them!) and intrinsically snackable; seen as health heroes, particularly blueberries; widely available year-around which encourages weekly “routine purchases”.

The emergence of berry brands and “good/better/best” tiers; and, like some other fruits, accelerated investment in R&D has delivered notable improvements in the qualities appreciated by customers (e.g. consistent delicious taste). Zespri’s Kiwi Gold and RubyRed kiwis are good examples of combining the power of intellectual property and branding to “decommodify” the more generic green kiwifruit category.

All produce items need to avoid “the commodity trap” epitomised by bananas – with 99% of those internationally traded being the Cavendish variety. Famous brands are associated with the fruit – Dole, Chiquita, Del Monte, Bonita, Fyffes and more – but few, if any of these generate a significant brand premium (would you switch supermarket because they’re out of Dole bananas rather than your regular Chiquita ones?).

Bananas have the dual function for the supplier of delivering huge volume in shipping such that they can inexpensively add on other higher margin produce.

Returning to the healthiness of fruit and vegetables, where can customers garner compelling claims as to the benefits of fruit and veggies – the fresh produce aisles of supermarkets?

No – wander around pharmacies such as Boots and note that cucumbers and berry extracts are lauded for their skin beautification properties. In the premium juice and smoothie aisles of supermarkets, product labels are crammed with claims relating to F&V portion equivalents which can be ingested with a few glugs in seconds! …..

SuperMarketsInYourPocket.com: Read the full article here

About the authors: Prof David Hughes: Around the world, David speaks to senior agribusiness and food industry managers about global food industry developments that are and will affect their businesses and industry. Energetic, engaging, humorous and insightful, David gains the very highest evaluations at seminars, conferences and Board level discussions in every continent he visits.
Miguel Flavián: works for several Spanish organisations and companies to help them to learn from the developments of the British grocery market and improve their business back home.