The 20-year-old sectors of a French exotic fruit SME are popular

No doubt that local food is desirable in terms of carbon footprint; but is not available for all organic and fair trade fruits.

Hence the richness represented by the supply channels of exotic fruits, dried fruits, and nuts, super fruits for an organic distributor.

And the difficulty for him to find a reliable partner

The challenge : to offer a triple qualitative guarantee: health, taste and sustainability.

Few suppliers offer these guarantees.

And to have guaranteed them for a very long time.

These guarantees have a price that must be accepted

The whole difficulty of export negotiations is to enhance, literally, the value of such supply chains.

In a word, sell value and not just a product whose only virtue would be the lowest price.

What is value?

What are our customers, the specialized organic stores and organic distributors promoting and what are organic consumers looking for today?

Beyond food; “external values”, externalities such as ecological, sustainable, transparency, health, energy abstinence , etc… values.

Value is the opposite of easy standardization which only focuses on the lowest possible price, to the point of completely sterilize a product.

A strategy based on low prices alone is a dead end for everyone.

High value products are complex to design, but this becomes an obstacle to market entry for competitors.

The value, the main strength of French organic food manufacturer when it comes to exportation

This is precisely the heart of the traditional know-how of French organic food makers.

They will always find customers abroad which willingness to pay will fill the “gap” which is the price of value.

A Danish multi-channel distributor for organic – IGP Ile de Ré salt

Supplier of both food service & the retail trades; this partner-importer will allow Ile de Ré to be present on all Danish organic tables.

This omnipresence is necessary to ensure volumes in a small market. Denmark is a country of less than six million inhabitants.

It is nevertheless the world champion of organic food consumption with 13% market share for €2.15 billion in 2019, €1.93 billion in 2022 (1).

(1) ahead of Austria (11.3%), Switzerland (10.8%) and in sixth position, France (6%)

The challenge here, selling Value Vs the sole price to a private label

The Anglo-Saxon concenpt of “Value” (contraction of “value for money”; in other words the “quality/price ratio”) takes on its full meaning.

There are in fact many much cheaper Organic labeled sea salt, from Portugal for example.

In order to maintain its attractive power, a private label, a generic brand by definition, must promote the distinctive signs of the product it will embody. The manufacturer’s task will be to get this private label to display them.

At a time when “Organic is not enough”, the PGI takes on its full value

It is in the manufacturer’s interest to particularize this private label by providing it with its own qualitative differentiation.

Why would the distributor deprive itself of this enrichment of its brand?

On the contrary, its major concern must be to highlight all distinctive signs. And the more specific, innovative they are; the higher the obstacle for a competitor to overcome… and the less interchangeable the supplier will be.