Harold Edwards: Yes, we’re sort of midstream in the fourth quarter now, the reason we brought the total volume of lemons down was because of the low fresh utilization that we achieved in the third quarter. A year ago, we were 75% fresh utilization. Because of the challenges with quality and some of the delays from the rainfall, we actually experienced utilization in the third quarter of about 60%. And so that’s really what basically you had the same amount of fruit that came off the trees, but only 60% made their way into the fresh box. And so that really had the big negative impact on volume for the year, which is why we brought our estimates for the year down. As we look forward into next 2024, we see significantly higher opportunities for growth in terms of total volume on both lemons and avocados.
So I think you’ll see significant growth of our own production, but also the production of our grower partners on the lemon side of the business and then significantly higher avocado volume because as we talk about the alternate bearing nature of avocado production, next year should be an up year. And as we’re out there looking at the trees and how many pieces are hanging on the trees; I think we’re pleased with what we see for next year.
Raj Sharma: Got right. That’s very helpful. And then just your plans on the expansion, a big part, expansion of the one world of citrus. Can you just kind of touch upon, again, your goals around that? I know you stated your goals in that business at the Investor Day, but also how do you measure progress or what does progress look like and how’s it going?
Harold Edwards: Yes, well, this year was a little bit of a setback because of the utilization. I think we’d sort of projected getting to 5.2 million cartons this year and it looks like it’s going to come in closer to 4.8 domestically. I think we’re right on track with our Chilean production and then we’re at or above our projections with the agency fruit. As we look to next year, we’d hope to be in that 5.2 to 5.5 million range of cartons of lemons that we would produce in combination with our grower partners. Chile next year should be about 1.8 to 2 million, somewhere in that range, 1.8 to 2 million cartons. And then the balance of the growth should be the agency fruit. So aside from the utilization setback this year, we’re actually on track with our forecasts and our targets for growing the grower partner side of our business and third party grower fruit.
So that seems to be right on track. So I believe that if we’re able to execute on fresh utilization levels above 70% next year, which our target is 75%, we should be right on track to be right where we had communicated at the Investor Day presentations. And as Mark alluded to earlier, we are optimistic that we’ll see higher pricing, which should then give us much greater opportunity for greater profits and EBITDA creation next year.
Raj Sharma: Thank you, that’s very helpful. Just lastly, you touched upon the progress in Chile, and I think Chile contributes a huge number, a pretty sizable number of your improvement in bottom line EBITDA. How’s that going and how do we make a progress there.
Harold Edwards: Right. Yes. The way to kind of follow progress there will be an announcement at some point of the successful monetization of our production assets and then the utilization of the capital that we’re able to achieve in that monetization process to begin construction and the development of a new packing house. So the next thing that we’ll want — you’ll want to see is us reporting on our successful sale of our production assets as well as then guidance on the timeframe of the construction project of our new packing facility in Chile.
Raj Sharma: Right. And does the production from or volume from Chile, does that get impacted at all by the bottlenecks the Panama Canal or?
