I will say that historically, Mission has marketed all of its fruit on its own. We haven’t looked to market fruit through other partners. I think that that is something that we will also evaluate as we move forward to the coming year. And it’s something that we haven’t really considered in the past.
Gerry Sweeney: When you say market it yourself, are you talking — that comment, was that specifically about Asia, or is that all three regions?
Bryan Giles: No, we’re talking 100% of the fruit that we harvest if it’s exported, Mission is the marketer of it. We’re evaluating whether some percentage of the fruit that we grow in Peru, we may send to other parties to let them market the fruit under their label. In certain markets, we think that that can help boost the returns for the farms without really compromising our competitive position.
Gerry Sweeney: Understood. And then the comment you made about Europe maybe pulling some fruit back there. I’m assuming that fruit would come to the US?
Bryan Giles: It would come to the US — it could go to the UK, it could come to the US. Those would be the most likely markets that it would end up in.
Gerry Sweeney: Could you have done, or are you able to do like an analysis? You pulled some fruit from Europe and brought it to the US, would have been more profitable this year?
Stephen J. Barnard: The EU, yes. The UK, probably not.
Bryan Giles: The belief is that we could have peeled off some fruit and brought it here. Again, it’s a fluid market and things change regularly. We went into last season thinking we were going to have a massive crop, Gerry. So, we accelerated harvest and we were looking at every possible market to move through — fruit through. It wasn’t until we got to late June, or I think it was late June, early July, that we started to see some of the impacts of the El Nino down at Peru, the warmer temperatures, causing fruit to not size up, and we’re actually seeing drop on the tree. So, we ended up accelerating harvest as the industry as a whole did, and there ended up kind of being a shortage of fruit, Peruvian fruit during the fourth quarter.
I think we could have managed things differently. We could have managed the harvest schedule over the season, and then we could have certainly managed the market allocation slightly differently had we known better. I think as we look to the coming year, we’re seeing more favorable weather conditions today. But certainly, that’s something we’re going to monitor closely to understand what the yields are going to potentially look like. I think that’s a big variable. But I think we feel, we’re confident that we can generate better overall sales returns next year than we did this year. This was certainly the lowest year on sales returns off Peruvian product that we’ve seen to date. And we think we can get it back close to what we were generating in fiscal 2021 and 2022, if not in excess of those figures.
Gerry Sweeney: Got it. And I get it. It’s a dynamic market too, I mean.
Bryan Giles: Yes.
Gerry Sweeney: Yes. I [Multiple Speakers]
Bryan Giles: We — it’s easy that we do a lot of second-guessing. There is things that could have been done differently. I think that we — when the seasons are over, we kind of look through everything and try to figure out what lessons we could learn from it and how we can behave differently going forward.
Gerry Sweeney: Got it. One last question. Obviously, Blueberries stand out in the quarter. Just curious, maybe what’s driving that growth? I think you talked about premium. You mentioned premium product or premium fruit. Just curious, what’s driving that? And outside of additional CapEx, what’s the opportunity there? Maybe even 1Q and in maybe the following year since we’re coming to the end of the [Multiple Speakers]
Stephen J. Barnard: Yes. One of the things that’s happened over the last probably three years, there’s some new varieties coming out that have much larger size to the berry itself. The flavors are addictive, and the yields are substantially larger. So, what we’ve done, we’ve — all these new plantings are these new special varieties, and we’re actually taking out some of the older blocks and also replacing them with these new varieties. But they sell for substantially more money per kilo, and the yields are much higher. So, that’s really the bottom line on why this thing has taken off. It’s — they’re just a much better product, and you get a lot more money for them. We will continue to phase out the old varieties over the next probably two to three years, and we’ll continue to plan a few more. We do have limits to where we’re going with this, of course, but it will be there in probably two to three years. Yes.
Bryan Giles: Yes. Gerry, we have somewhere probably slightly over 500 hectares of blueberries planted today. Certainly, we’ve got some future plantings up in the northern region of Peru that we’ve communicated previously that we’ll build out to probably get another 500 hectares before all said and done. I think the market that we’re looking at today, there is a couple of things going on. Number one, we’re benefiting from a much stronger pricing market today than we were a year ago. And a lot of that is due to the fact that the overall industry crop out of Peru is significantly lower this year than it was last year. I mean what we’re hearing is it’s 30%, 35% lower as an industry. We’re not seeing that same 30% to 35% reduction out of our crop because our plants are still younger, and we’re putting in some of these new varieties that are driving better yields.
