The Greek kiwi season started performing a lot better after a slower start in 2022, says Antonis Ioannidis, Sales Manger for Zeus Kiwi: “There has indeed been a slow start to our kiwi season. The reason for this is an aggressive approach in terms of pricing by both the Greek kiwi exporters as well as the Italians. People wanted to get rid of their stock as soon as possible to avoid the storage costs. This resulted in an oversupply on the market, while demand was relatively low in both the European and overseas markets. This situation lasted until the end of 2022 and even a bit at the start of 2023.”
Thankfully, this situation didn’t last for the full season, as supplies started decreasing after a while, Ioannidis explains. “By February of 2023, we started seeing improvements in the market. The big supply by the exporters that wanted to move fruit as soon as possible had run out. Now it remained a strange season, as we’d seen mostly smaller sized kiwis. But improvements started to show by this time. Right now we’re close to the end of our kiwi campaign. The last volumes will be sent in the final week of May. Our overseas shipments stopped in week 18.”