With celebrity marketing campaigns, a sparkling new pack house facility and a quality product that is in demand all over the world, right now is a good time for leading SA fruit business, EKM Exports.
South Africa’s fruit export business is hugely important to the country’s economy. The country is one of the world’s largest exporters of citrus fruits and SA products are enjoyed all over the world. Exporting brings much needed cash into the economy and trading in international markets supports many jobs. It’s essential that South Africa continues to invest in such an important business and helps to grow it so that people can benefit from the nations fertile land.
One company that has continued to drive the fruit export business forward is Gauteng-based EKM Exports, one of the country’s leading fruit growers and exporters. Now exporting in excess of three million cartons of carefully grown SA citrus produce every year, EKM is marketing aggressively in foreign markets, taking advantage of favourable foreign trade conditions and also looking to the continent for further growth.
“The biggest receiver of our total basket of fruit is China. 35% of our volume goes into the Far-East markets. 30% of our volume goes into Europe. Europe is attractive for all exporters as the continent consumes all types of varieties sizes and class 1 and class 2 fruit. After that comes the Middle East, Canada and other smaller markets,” explains EKM Director, Brendon Kruger.
“There is a lot of demand in the countries such as Angola, Zambia, Senegal, Sudan, Nigeria and surrounding; however the problem is that the pricing is not competitive, although we are still adamant to continuously increase our volumes into Africa.”
Unlike many other companies, the downward trend in the currency market, seeing the Rand reach record lows against the Euro and Dollar, has seen the export market become hugely attractive to foreign buyers.
“For us, in the export market, it’s been positive,” says Kruger. “Obviously things get more expensive for the farmers; production costs, fertiliser, chemicals, wages etc. but overall it’s more positive than negative for us. For the farmers that have the quality fruit to export – they’re benefitting a lot. We as producers realise in the short term we will benefit on the exchange rate but even if it stays this way in the long-term the cost will catch up with us and the benefit of the weak rand will be something of the past.”
GROWING ORGANICALLY
After its formation in 1998, EKM and GoGo has grown significantly and now employs more than 2200 people across all operations. The company only sources fruit from reliable suppliers who hold quality and professionalism in the highest regard.
In order to continue growing and developing relationships with important existing and potential customers, the company started a marketing campaign in 2015, using a South Africa cricket legend as the spearhead. Currently recognised as one of the greatest batsmen of all time, playing for the Royal Challengers Bangalore in India, De Villiers in the face of the GoGo citrus brand and helps drive business in Asian markets.
“It’s definitely a positive thing in the market, especially in places like India and Bangladesh,” says Kruger. “We are going to carry on with this campaign and push it harder than we have before. We met AB and he’s a businessman as well as a cricket player.”
India has been identified as a key target market for SA fruit exporters who are reportedly expecting to see a significant increase in the volumes of fruit available for export over the medium to long-term.
The CGA said last month: “India is seen as offering huge potential. With present volumes of about 9,000 pallets the goal is to increase this volume by tenfold during the next ten years. Most players in the Indian market believe that this is possible.”
CGA CEO Justin Chadwick spoke to Asia fruit at Fresh Produce India and said: “In order to make that happen role-players from Southern Africa will need to understand the dynamics of the market.”
EKM certainly understands the market and its success at home, farming in South Africa, is matched in its chosen export locations. ‘Our aim is to make high quality fruit available to everyone, everywhere’ is the one of the company’s slogans and quality forms the base of the next planned major investment.
“The next stage for us is that we want to have all of our farms under protective netting so that we can bolster our volumes with Super Class 1 fruits as markets will pay a premium for that quality. It’s about quality over quantity; for the moment we want to in invest in vertical growth by getting maximum quality product per hectare and not horizontal growth by adding more hectares,” says Kruger.
FRUIT IN THE FAMILY
GoGo was established by two brothers Tian Kruger and Eben Kruger. EKM is the export company that markets the fruit of the GoGo farmers and many other top quality producers. Eben Kruger (Brendon’s father) is the CEO of the export company and Tian is the biggest producer in the group. As a brilliant farmer Tian started with citrus 18 years ago and immediately got his brother involved on the marketing side. Together they have grown the business to what it is today and using their passionate approach to business, they have been the catalyst behind the development of the GoGo group and EKM Exports.
“We started with only exporting Tian’s fruit and soon after, we started exporting for a few farmers in the area. Instead of exporting for five, six or seven different farmers, they created a brand that was attractive so that the farmers could build a name in the markets that their exporting to,” explains Brendon. “The GoGo group was formed with five farmers that are of some of the best in the business and together they have followed the same dream for the last 15 years. Throughout that time we have grown from strength to strength investing in everything necessary with citrus and table grape farming. Big investments over the last three years were the state-of-the-art cold room facilities and the very expensive investment covering our orchards with nets. The latest is the new pack house that came in operation in May.”
The family approach to business from the Kruger’s has allowed the company to remain true to its values and, leading by example, Eben Kruger has shared his drive and determination. “Each and every member of the team has a fire burning deep within his core. A desire to exceed expectations. A desire to innovate. A desire to succeed,” the company says. “We have a close-knit, streamlined team. Each of our markets has dedicated personnel enabling 24 hour communication and personal, transparent relationships.”
Today, EKM’s product portfolio includes the GoGo citrus range of oranges, lemons and soft citrus. With table grapes, the group is expanding quickly to fulfil big demands from the market.
“With citrus the five GoGo farmers have a total of 815 hectares and 1050 hectares will be in production by the end of 2017. EKM Exports target is to export 2500 containers in 2016 which will include grapes, apples and citrus,” says Brendon.
NEW PACK HOUSE
The most recent investment for EKM is a brand new 8000m2 pack house, located alongside the company’s existing 9500m2cold room infrastructure, allowing for smooth, efficient and streamlined movement, prep and storage of goods. Using MAF RODA machines from France, the most sophisticated machinery in fruit industry, the pack house can class fruit by colour, size, blemishes, and shape.
The more-than-R100 million investment is a statement of intent from the GoGo group and EKM Exports, signalling ambition for the future, creating in excess of another 350 local jobs.
“The pack house was built for and by the GoGo group. We built one centralised pack house next to our cold room facility. The first reason was that the volumes became too big for each producers existing pack house. Another benefit is that everyone is using the same pack house so the quality is standardised. It makes packing orders for clients easier and quicker – if a client is ordering so many cases of a certain class, we can pack it exactly how they want it. The pack house can pack around 90 tons of fruit each hour,” Kruger says.
“We’re the only inland cold-room facility in South Africa that is approved for phytosanitary inspections as well as doing the pre-cooling for special markets like China, India, and Taiwan. In the past, any grower or exporter would have to send containers of fruit to the port and at the port they would do the inspections and this caused congestion and delays as everyone is harvesting at the same time and everybody is sending their fruit to the port at the same time. Now that we have the pack house right next to the cold-room, we are much more efficient.
“The fruit goes straight from the pack house into the cold-room and we load the containers, seal them, and the next time the container is opened is by the client overseas,” he adds.
This is an extremely exciting time for EKM Exports and the GoGo brand. With its marketing efforts helping to gain further traction in the Indian and Bangladeshi markets, and investments in infrastructure in South Africa making operations more efficient than ever, this is a business that is set for the future and one which has positioned itself extremely strongly as it continues to grow.