Apr 7, 2007

Hip Apple Seeks Market Groove

A few Washington apple producers are starting to benefit from being members of an exclusive club that grows a New Zealand apple called Jazz.

The variety moved into retail stores in the United States and Canada this summer at $50 a box and came out in grocery bags at $2.49 a pound.

“There’s no question that demand exceeds supply right now,” said David Nelley, pipfruit category director for the Oppenheimer Group, which put together a summer promotion for the new apple.

The plan is to make sure that the supply-demand imbalance that benefits growers continues.

“The mid-range goal is to produce and sell 3 million cartons a year from New Zealand growers and another 1.5 million cartons each from Washington and France,” Nelley said. “Globally, all the trees to produce that volume are already in the ground.”

The Oppenheimer Group is the North American marketing arm of ENZA, the New Zealand exporting company that markets fruit from the island nation.

Jazz was developed about 10 years ago from a cross between Royal Gala and Braeburn. The first fruit began to be marketed in the United States two years ago, and this summer the Oppenheimer Group “orchestrated” a promotion in the United States and Canada playing off the Jazz name.

During the promotion, called “the Pure Apple Groove of Jazz,” the apple was sampled at jazz festivals and concerts as well as retail produce departments. Oppenheimer brought jazz musicians into stores to accompany shoppers as they sampled the tangy-sweet apple.

“It’s been a lot of fun to leverage off the ‘Jazz’ name in our promotions,” Nelley said. “We’re positioning Jazz as the hip apple that delivers a crisp, pure flavor and crunch, so ‘Pure Apple Groove’ is the positioning statement for the variety.”

The demand for the apple is especially good, Nelley said, as many stores sold out during the sampling events, despite the typical $2.49 per pound pricing.

“We’ve seen stores sell eight to 10 40-pound boxes in a matter of hours,” he said. “Jazz is a high-value, high-turn item that contributes smartly to produce department profits.”

The New Zealand-grown Jazz crop is about “75 percent sold” and moving quickly at $50 per box, according to Nelley. The promotion will build demand for the Washington crop, which will arrive this fall.

Jazz apples, as well as apples of the Pacific Rose variety, are part of an ENZA licensing, production and marketing arrangement involving growers in both New Zealand and Washington.

“Between the two hemispheres, we’re working toward a year-round supply of Jazz and Pacific Rose,” Nelley said.

Earlier this summer, Nelley said, he met in Wenatchee, Wash., with the advisory committee representing the 30-plus Washington producers who grow Jazz and Pacific Rose.

“We discussed the overall strategy of the program, and we reached substantial agreement on the marketing plan for 2005-06,” he said.

The meeting involved a review of the current New Zealand season and set the scene for the Washington harvest.

“Our hope is that the trade is experiencing so much success with the New Zealand-grown fruit that anticipation for the Washington Jazz and Pacific Rose will be very high in the autumn,” Nelley said. “With fruit coming from both hemispheres, the excitement we build during the New Zealand season will help create demand for the Washington fruit.”

Approximately 680 acres of Jazz and 475 acres of Pacific Rose are currently grown in Washington.

The apple trade is already talking about Jazz as being the number two “most promising” apple behind HoneyCrisp, Nelley said.

“We’ve really made a splash, considering less than 50,000 cases have been sold.”

Marketing Jazz

The Oppenheimer Group has a long history of making something happen by bringing foreign fruit into the United States. On its Web site, www.oppyproduce.com, it tells of “riding the waves of the dynamic fresh produce industry” since the company was first formed more than 145 years ago.

Originally operating from Vancouver, British Columbia, the four Oppenheimer brothers brought mandarin oranges from Japan in 1884. As the company grew and changed, it brought stone fruits and grapes from Chile and kiwi from New Zealand in the 1950s. It brought square watermelons from Japan in 2002. It has a long association with New Zealand, starting with kiwi in the 1950s, Granny Smith apples in 1956 and following with Royal Gala and Braeburn. Now, it’s marketing the newest wave of apple varieties.

New Zealand, as a source of apples, has changed, too. Its new apple varieties from a half-century ago were planted worldwide. Now, it has developed methods of control that limit plantings of new varieties and assure that New Zealand growers profit from them first, for as long as consumers want to buy them.

The strategy now is to control a variety from breeding and propagation to production and marketing. Control is carried out by the combined efforts of Pipfruit New Zealand, a grower organization; HortResearch, the breeding organization; Associated International Group of Nurseries, the propagators and marketers of trees; and Apple and Pear Australia, a partner in the enterprise. The New Zealand Apple Marketing Board operates the export agency ENZA.

Jazz is one of the new “club apples,” and a few Washington growers are members of the club. Any opportunity to expand in tree numbers, created by expanding demand, will be offered to existing growers first, Nelley said. So, whether growers elsewhere will ever plant Jazz is a question best answered with a qualified “no.”

Washington Growers

Two of the Washington growers are Crane and Crane in Brewster, Wash., and Sagemoor Farms in Pasco, Wash.

Bob Brammer is president of the family enterprise Crane and Crane Inc., in which his wife is part of the fifth generation. Crane and Crane is the largest grower of ENZA apples in Washington. Among its thousand acres of apples are 85 acres of Jazz and 190 of Pacific Rose. The orchard also grows HoneyCrisp and varieties like Jonathan and Rome for niche markets.

“We were looking for new options in apples to plant and discovered these through our nursery,” Brammer said. “We requested to be part of it and we were accepted. The whole process is controlled from beginning to end.”

That intrigued Brammer.

“We need some method to get more money for our apples,” he said. “Trying to be the low-cost producer of Red Delicious is not a good plan. You can’t recapitalize an orchard on $10-a-box fruit.”

What growers need, he said, are quality apples that give customers a good eating experience and that can stand up to the distribution system. Jazz not only tastes good, but it’s a durable apple, he said.

“If it sits in a dish on the table for two weeks, it’s still good. And it will store for seven months.”

Kent Waliser planted his first Jazz this year and also grows Pacific Rose. He’s the farm manager at Sagemoor Farms, which has 1,200 acres devoted to apples, sweet cherries and wine grapes.

He’s long been interested in the club concept in which “production is limited and it’s possible to develop a product to its maximum potential.”

Good apple varieties can be ruined by over-production, which wrecks price, and by poor production decisions, which cast doubt on quality, he said.

“Conceptually, this is a really good plan. It’s not a free-for-all where growers try to out-compete each other all the way to the bottom.

“These varieties won’t be grown where they shouldn’t be grown,” he said.

Sagemoor’s Jazz plantings are on a 4- by 10-foot spacing in a trellis system on M-9 rootstock.

“With nearly 1,100 trees per acre, we’ll have a worthwhile crop already in the second year,” he said.

Not many apples per tree perhaps, but still a lot of apples.

Brammer planted Jazz on M-26 and M-9, on trellis, from 450 to 800 trees per acre.

“This isn’t the only apple that is part of the club concept,” Brammer said. “There’s a big push toward these proprietary varieties. There’s a growing acceptance of the idea because we have to get more of the value back to the grower, and this is a way to do it.”