In these days, the shelves of the Italian large-scale retail trade offer a disheartening picture in the berries category. Stockouts, struggling promotions, and quality at an all-time low.
The Italian Berry Retail Monitor has documented in detail the situation in Florence, where on July 10, 2024, the berries assortment was analyzed in 14 retail points, from supermarkets to discount stores and hypermarkets.
The weather damages in Northern Italy
At the production level, the last few weeks have highlighted a real emergency in the availability of Italian berries, mainly due to the bad weather that hit the production areas in Northern Italy.
Since the end of May, Piedmont, the main production area in Italy, had been hit by continuous bad weather episodes: the rains had indeed left few gaps, with almost double the average rainfall for the period (+88%) and fairly evenly distributed throughout the regional territory. Significant rain for the period was recorded on half of the days, i.e., over 5mm considered normal for the month of May.
Total rainfall in June in the province of Cuneo was 124mm (+28% compared to the 1991-2020 period) according to Arpa Piemonte data. In Saluzzo, rain and thunderstorms characterized the weather conditions for 17 days out of 30 in June, with humidity rates always above 70%, peaking at 97% on June 24, during the peak blueberry harvest period (data from ilMeteo.it).
The effects on the shelves
The talian Berry Retail Monitory highlighted in Florence a general difficulty for retailers in managing the emergency that affected the availability of blueberries, raspberries, and blackberries.
This caused frequent episodes of stockouts or poorly stocked shelves.
Quality drops
But it is especially the poor quality that characterized the products on the shelves in the Tuscan capital. Italian Berry measures quality based on a visual inspection of samples, assigning a rating on a scale of 0-3, where 3 corresponds to the absence of obvious defects and 0 corresponds to the presence of spoiled fruits.
Especially for blueberries and raspberries, the drop in quality was very evident. While on average, the blueberries observed in the first half of the year had a rating of 2.61, in the survey on 10/7 the quality plummeted to 1.24.
The quality of raspberries was even worse: against a six-month average of 2.24, the average rating observed in Florence on July 10, 2024, was 0.63.
Empty shelves
In addition to quality issues, in Florence, there were also evident difficulties in stock management, with empty shelves in a high percentage of retail points:
- Blueberries: empty shelves in 4 out of 14 points of sale (29%)
- Raspberries: empty shelves in 1 out of 14 points of sale (7%)
- Blackberries: empty shelves in 1 out of 14 points of sale (7%)
Questionable emergency management
Only Coop implemented actions aimed at consumers to manage the emergency, and we discussed it in this post on Italian Berry. Coop had to explain to consumers why the product was not available on the shelf during a full promotion and did so in its own way.
In the other retail points visited, the consumer, if they found the product, found it to be generally of lower than average quality and, in the case of blueberries and raspberries (which account for about 85% of category sales), of very poor quality.
It was certainly a disappointing service for consumers and does not help the growth of the category. It was a transversal disappointment, affecting consumers of all the chains present in the Tuscan capital. And everything suggests that, at this time, the situation is not much different at the national level.
