Insiders say sustainability and consumers, and increasing consistent quality were a few topics discussed at the first Apple Quality Summit 2021, hosted by Hazel Technologies, Inc.
In 2020, Mario Cervantes of Hazel Technologies reported the company treated 3.2 billion lbs. of food and prevented more than 270 million lbs. from going to waste with its technologies–the Hazel 100™ 5g bin sachet and Hazel CA technologies, which help protect the quality of the fruit in bins, plus Hazel Datica which monitors cold storage in real time.
In sales industrywide, apples in 2020 were the second largest within fruit dollars–of the approximately $33 billion on fruit sales in 2020, while $7.2 billion went to berries, apples carved out $4 billion–an increase of 1.2 percent in dollars over the year prior. While that dollar increase may seem modest, Anne-Marie Roerink of 210 Analytics and Summit speaker said in pounds, apples moved more significantly. “We moved apples well in pounds –up 6.1 percent but we didn’t keep up with dollars so that points to deflation,” said Roerink.