South Africa’s largest distributor of apples and pears Tru-Cape Fruit Marketing on Thursday officially launched a more than 4 000 m² depot in City Deep, Johannesburg, to service sub-Saharan Africa.

“As apples and pears are not grown to the North of our borders, City Deep, Johannesburg, is a convenient collection point for our fruit as customers also shop at the nearby municipal markets for other produce,” said Tru-Cape MD Roelf Pienaar.

The facility was expected to take more than 18-million cartons of fruit to market in the next five years, with Tru-Cape chairperson Pieter Graaff noting the “trees [are] in the ground”. This represented growth of 10% year-on-year; however, he believed in five year’s time the facility was going to be too small, adding that the company was “confident that the market is there for apples and pears”.

He said the facility was needed as an integral part of Tru-Cape’s distribution. “To receive orders in Johannesburg from the Cape and have them delivered in a short space of time is very difficult, but if we have stock here we can meet our clients demand [timeously],” Graaff highlighted.

Pienaar advised that the company was now able to immediately replenish local retailers, which were previously subjected to a 48-hour delay, while fruit was freighted from Cape Town. “The end result for the consumer will be a better quality product that has had less storage time in retailers’ fridges,” he commented.

The City Deep facility provided Tru-Cape with capacity for 1 152 palettes of fruit as well as administration and meetings spaces.

“This will [not only] allow us to better and more frequently replenish our local customers but also to plan to further expand our cross-border business into Africa, already 36% more year-on-year,” Pienaar noted.

Tru-Cape had experienced increased cross-border business with Mozambique, Lesotho, Tanzania, Botswana and others, with road freight leaving from Johannesburg into sub-Saharan Africa ever more frequently.

“We have created spaces in our new building especially dedicated to offering these customers a working and rest space, including shower facilities while purchases are being loaded,” Pienaar pointed out.

He said the launch of the new facility was a big day for the grower-owned company and concluded its Closer-to-Market strategy announced last year, to further increase returns for its growers by capturing more of the value chain.

Through Tru-Cape’s Closer-to-Market strategy the company had worked more directly with key customers, focusing specifically on Africa and the Middle East.

“This will ultimately lead to greater management of the value chain and increased returns to our grower shareholders, Pienaar said, adding that there was a big portion of Tru-Cape’s fruit that was on the local and cross-border markets.

The depot was five times larger than the company’s previous facility, which had served Tru-Cape and its grower owners from Ceres Fruit Growers and Two-a-Day for 30 years.

Graaff explained that, from conception, it had taken five years to complete the project, on which the company spent double than initially budgeted. The company made the decision to buy the property on which the City Deep depot is located a week after being informed that its old property had been sold.

The facility had five cold-storage rooms, which could each hold 240 pallets. The temperature of each room could be individually controlled. The City Deep depot also comprised two sterilisation rooms, in which fruit would be kept at a certain temperature for 12 days to ensure it was free of pathogens. Each sterilisation room could hold 36 pallets. The facility also had three loading bays, a holding and inspection facility and three plug-in points for refrigerated containers. Provision had also been made to load any type of vehicle used by a customer, with Tru-Cape eyeing new customers and planning to grow its 60% share of informal market business by these advances.

“We are also growing our basket by adding other fruit and veg lines, adding greater value to our growers by managing more of their total crop and not only apples, pears and cherries,” Pienaar stated.

The Somerset West-headquartered company’s fruit is grown in the Western Cape, around Elgin, Grabouw and Ceres, and in the Southern Cape, in the Langkloof.