A year after the establishment of Zespri, new regulations in the United States trigger market entry for a new tropical fruit brand with Brazilian origins that had already found success in Europe.
“In 1998, Brazil received the authorization to export papayas to the USA, which is when our family emigrated to Florida and set up an office to start importing Brazilian Caliman-brand papayas,” says Melissa Hartmann de Barros, communications director at HLB Specialties in Fort Lauderdale, FL.
Melissa’s father, Homero Levy de Barros, had founded HLB Tropical Food in Germany in 1989 as a fresh fish import business, but in 1992, he made the shift to air-freight fresh papayas.
Through a partnership with Espirito Santo, Brazil-based grower Caliman Agricola, the strategy was to assume the risk of displaying papayas with at least 50% color versus green fruit.
“If the fruit didn’t sell, HLB offered to pay for it. To the retailers’ surprise, the yellow papayas sold, and a trend was established and soon many big retailers started carrying papayas with color,” says Hartmann de Barros. “HLB helped set the standard for the European papaya industry, and we are known as pioneers in the field.”
The company followed a similar formula with its North American operations and quickly grew to become one of the largest papaya importers and distributors into the United States. and Canada.
“Before then, U.S. consumers had Hawaiian and Jamaican papayas to choose from, but supply was not nearly what it became once Brazil entered the market,” she says. “Offering Brazilian fruit created demand and sales picked up very quickly. Soon HLB was receiving more than 150 pallets a week by air of Brazilian Papayas alone.”
In the beginning, store demos were a very important part of the strategy to raise awareness about the fairly new product, along with point-of-purchase (POP) materials, including 1,000 stands to hold three papaya boxes with instructions on eating the fruit and recipes.
“At that time, we were almost synonymous with Caliman Papayas, which is why we changed our company name to Caliman International for a few years,” says Hartmann de Barros. “We changed that back to HLB when we started carrying products other than Caliman papayas.”
HLB Specialties had another growth spurt in 2010 when it started importing large papayas of the Tainung variety, known as Formosa in Europe.
“Since 2010, our company’s sales have tripled, and we have new tropical items now and expect the company to keep growing.”
BY: LESLIE DECEMBER 1, 2019
Originally printed in the December 2019 issue of Produce Business.
Source: https://www.producebusiness.com/how-newer-global-fruit-brands-penetrate-north-american-markets/
