The taste of apricot, peach and nectarine. If spring has left little room for the first fruits of stone fruit, the last few weeks have seen a decisive turnaround: both in the quality of the products and in the market demand. And if production is qualified by being biological and biodynamic, there is some more satisfaction. And this is the case of the Op Carpe Naturam of Corigliano Calabro (Cosenza), one of the founding members of Bia, an agricultural consortium of organic fruit and vegetable producers.
“It is useless to deny it: the stone fruits, for us who are specialized in the first fruits, have experienced a difficult campaign, conditioned by a climatic trend that has determined a not always adequate organoleptic level: in spring, when the temperatures were low, the taste it was not interesting therefore it was difficult to conquer the consumer “, explains Anita Minisci, commercial director of Carpe Naturam and member of Bia’s board, to Italiafruit News. “Now, however, things have changed: after working with rather slow northern European markets, where small numbers have developed, in the last few weeks, with the arrival of heat, the exchanges have broken down and we are finally working at a normal pace” .
Carpe Naturam grows stone fruit on an area of about 60 hectares. The OP members made their debut in the countryside with apricots in tunnels, then switched to peaches, nectarines, red apricots. A specialty of the Calabrian group is flat fishing. “The Spanish production of this fruit has been so important that it has been a bit difficult to place the fruit in European markets – continues Minisci – On the banks of European retail chains, there is a struggle between the various types of peaches to conquer a bit of space: there are chains that have decided to eliminate round peaches to favor the flat, which from a niche article have by now been transformed into a consumer product, capable of replacing traditional varieties Obviously, this sort of cannibalism necessarily damages some reference almost substitute “.
In this context, expressing a biodynamic production is helpful. “For us the biodynamic has been a business evolution: if an organic farm is also biodynamic then it is certainly an evolved biological company – explains the commercial director of Carpe Naturam – an extra piece to give value to the company and to its productions I insist and repeat: the fundamental element of this method of cultivation is the positive response in terms of the ‘production system’, even before being commercial.We consider biodynamic the best cultivation method possible today, we should adopt it regardless. Our stone fruit production was born as a biodynamic project “.
Carpe Naturam, as mentioned, is among the founding members of the Bia consortium and is, on behalf of the consortium, the management platform in Southern Italy. “Bia is always looking for realities and incentives to conquer new spaces and face new challenges – says Anita Minisci – Everything is done with the concreteness of a reality born of production for production, but towards the market: we have a vision of improvement and of the evolution of the business that starts from the customer’s needs, that’s why we are market-oriented starting from the production systems “.
And the Gdo answers? “To the extent that it decides to open its doors to production – replies the manager – There is a foreign trade that has been very well organized for some time in the organic sector of which Bia’s partners were already suppliers, and then there is the Italian one, which when it opened its doors to producers’ organizations it was able to verify, monitoring it, the potential of this system Now, concludes
Anita Minisci – we expect that other large-scale retail chains will also look and take an interest in our type of organization and proposal “.