A few years ago, the media was flooded with information about fines for the Poland’s largest retailer for falsifying the country of origin of fruits and vegetables. On many Internet forums, retail chains in the country are blamed for misleading Poles and promoting foreign food at the expense of the Polish farmer. I worked as a fruit and vegetable buyer in a Polish retail chain for almost 5 years and I would like to say couple of words how it looks from my perspective.
Digital product passport -solution for falsifying the country of origin of fruits and vegetables
There is currently no tool on the market that can guarantee the origin of an agricultural product with unwavering certainty. All traceability systems , i.e. product origin testing, are declarative in nature. In other words, the vendor declares, according to a chosen methodology, that the product sold comes from a particular country and a particular farm. However, it is difficult to verify such a declaration, or perhaps it should be said that such a declaration is very easy to falsify.
Falsification of the country of origin of fruit and vegetables – attempts to solve the problem.
A number of operators are working on the creation of a digital product passport, which would provide a guarantee that a given potato, strawberry or raspberry definitely comes from the declared country of origin. One such initiative is, among others, the online agricultural exchange defood.org which allows the stage of production of the exhibited commodity to be specified when adding an offer and allows details of the offer to be provided. Another example is the Polish Food Passportisation project run by the National Centre of Agricultural Support.
The buyer looks at the country of origin of fruit and vegetables.
In the practice of trading fruit and vegetables, the country of origin of a product is one of the key pieces of information from a buyer’s perspective. Every buyer is also aware that at certain points in the season, particular countries of origin are more valued by the consumer than others. The best example is the beginning of the Polish strawberry season. Despite the availability of strawberries from Greece, Spain or Serbia at the same time, buyers from the major retail chains still seek out Polish strawberries and are able to pay significantly more for them than for imported product.
My experience with the country of origin of fruit and vegetables.
From my experience, I can say that some suppliers of the major retail chains tried to take advantage of the seasonal needs of the buyers and the lack of any control mechanism over the origin of fruit and vegetables. They were able to offer whatever the buyer needed, regardless of the season and the actual availability of the product. This was done on the basis of what is known as 'product spilling’. What exactly does this practice consist of?
What is the „product spilling”?
-And this strawberry is from Poland, correct?
-It will be from Poland if necessary….
During the many sales conversations I had while working as a buyer, I sometimes heard this type of response.
Unfortunately, still for many participants in the fruit and vegetable trade, falsifying the country of origin of fruit and vegetables is the basis of their business. When the peak supply of a foreign product and the beginning of the supply of a Polish product coincide, dishonest traders „spill” the foreign product and mark it as Polish. As a result of the falsification, they gain a significant advantage because:
- They buy the product at the low price of an imported product,
- They sell at the price of the Polish product, usually gently lowering it so as to easily attract customers.
The more clever sellers omit the country of origin information altogether, however, displaying it in packaging characteristic of the domestic market, e.g. foreign strawberries in wooden tubs.
Tracą sieci handlowe i nie tylko
In my view, overstuffing is simply fraud and should be stigmatized tised like any other fraud. It is a serious market pathology that everyone should fight against. Why should everyone? Because I believe that, at the end of the day, all those involved in the trade lose out from falsifying the country of origin of fruit and vegetables, apart from a small group of fraudsters.
As a first step
Firstly, honest importers of foreign products lose out. There is nothing wrong with selling a product from abroad, as long as we openly inform the customer about it, giving them the right to make an informed choice. There are a lot of honest importers on the market who trade goods from different countries at market prices. In this situation, a counterfeiter who incorrectly marks the country of origin achieves an unfair competitive advantage. This is because he pays the same price for the goods as his honest competitor, but sells at a much higher margin thanks to the falsification.
Polish producers
Polish producers also lose out. Falsification of the country of origin of fruit and vegetables most often accelerates the fall in the high prices of domestic production at the beginning of the season, which sometimes account for a large share of the final income from a whole year’s production. Producing the first fruit and vegetables is most often time- and capital-consuming and, as a result, the producer expects to be able to sell the first harvest at a price which compensates for this outlay. Unfortunately, he or she often has to compete with a fraudster who, without the pressure of high costs (because he or she bought cheap from abroad), can afford to go down in price more quickly just to get rid of the product.
Last but not least, customers also lose out. A customer buying products labelled as Polish but tasting like imported products will be disappointed.
Summary
Conclusion? The retail chains gain no advantage from falsifying the country of origin of fruit and vegetables. This does not mean that the chains will only trade with Polish goods. Foreign fruit and vegetables will continue to appear on the shelves of Biedronka and Lidl. However, in my opinion, it is the modern trade that is most concerned today with the clear labelling of the country of origin of fruit and vegetables, and the falsification procedure is most often carried out in traditional markets.
If you would like to find out more about the issue of country-of-origin labelling in retail chains, let’s get in touch!