Nergeta Logo is a Protected Trademark

We are pleased to hear from the Georgian Patent Office that our logo has now been copyrighted and protected by law as the Nergeta logo. We are very happy that our logo was made by ourselves and that we did not "delegate" it to some outside design company. We now believe that if you look at your product (literally) for many days, think about how you can express your product and its best features graphically, you will eventually arrive to your own design idea. Our own work was the result of focus on the product and search for most relevant geometrical shapes to transform our product vision into a logo.

As we were doing what we really loved to do, we wanted to have our own unique logo and stickers for two main reasons:
1. our work should bear "our" mark, distinctive, simple and beautiful.
2. consumer should like our logo and perceive it as a sign of quality, and memorise it as that.

We started with the traditional approach: visiting three famous advertising and branding agencies in Tbilisi. We got the impression that those 1 hour meetings just were not enough for them to undertand what we stood for, what we wanted to say with a logo and we decided to do homework and give it several weeks of thinking.

We were inspired by MC Saatchi's: "it is easier to complicate than to simplify" and "brutal simplicity of thought". After several weeks of homework we decided to link kiwifruit's visual features to different geometrical shapes and then gave our hand made sketches to friend, a designer by training, Mari Balavadze, to make those professional computer graphics and also add her own ideas. We did not get to our final version at the first attempt, actually we rejected several of our own works and together with Mari and other friends arrived to what is now our logo: 9 oval slices that together resemble the rising sun and we gave flesh green colour to oval slices and put black circles to establish the connection to our product: kiwifruit.

It was not an easy task and at one point we thought (really) that we just could not produce a logo which would look original and in the meantime be immediately associated with kiwifruit. However we made it and looking back, we can say that it is thanks to our own homework, many many hours of producing numerous options, then going through them critically, rejecting many of them and finally arriving to what we thought was a worthy one.

Contact me at:
Konstantine.Vekua@nergeta.ge

Nergeta Press Appearance

We have not concentrated much on generating coverage in the press, since we primarily want to get the product right. However, we have been approached by some journalists, and here is one of the first problem articles written about this, by the November issue of Georgian Products (issued by the publishing house Navigator).



If you want the full PDF, let us know.

How Far Would We Go For Knowledge? As Far As New Zealand

While China is the origin of wild kiwifruit, New Zealand growers, nurserymen and scientists pushed it from obscurity into becoming one of the world's top fruits. It took a lot of work and trials and this is why New Zealand became most sophisticated and knowledgeable in kiwifruit propagation, cultivation and marketing.

As we wanted to learn from them we decided to visit New Zealand where we saw and heard many useful things for our own orchard development. As one of our new friends told us we have "no excuses now". It will take 3 to 4 years to see if we made a good use of their advice and here we just give you some of photos of this fascinating trip.

countdown to 18 hour avia-marathon in Dubai airport

New Zealand, a country of volcanic icelands



Pacific Ocean "nebulising" the forest

Auckland, not the capital of New Zealand

Eden Park, "All Blacks" play here

Kiwifruit -- the reason of our trip

Natural, Bio, Eco, Local or What?

Everyday in Georgia and elsewhere we see that many companies from consumer food industries emphasize two main points: that their products are 100% natural (bio, ecologically clean) and that they are local. In Georgia lots of consumers also think that "local" automatically means "healthy, natural" in the sense of what "organic" means for instance in Germany.

We think that as soon as there will be several Georgian producers of labeled fruit instead of one, companies will need to offer more than just emphasizing the "local origin of their product". For this reason we ignored the "local" argument from the start and focused on quality, the real quality. We also do not just play with words like "natural" and "bio" without a relevant test report to prove it.

As a sign of our approach, we took samples of our kiwifruit to an accredited lab, had a test done, and published it on our Facebook fan page as well as on Facebook pages of "Made in Georgia" and Georgian business news programme.

Here is the copy of test report which shows that value of nitrates in our kiwifruit is about 5 times less than allowed and pesticides are so low that they are practically undetectable. We will keep doing these tests continuously, and focus on quality so that customers know they can trust our product.

Why Quality of Product is Important, Part 2: B2B

As we do not sell directly to consumers, we cooperate with retailers and our retailers are very diverse: supermarket chains, small grocery shops, street fruit sellers, and a wide variation of those.

We had no idea who they were, what would attract them, how we could keep them happy. We believed that as our product was "first ever labeled, sorted, calibrated, ripeness measured, nicely packed Georgian fruit" our business customers would definitely like to try and offer it to their own customers. At the end of the day, retailers are supposed to buy whatever their customers like and we believed in the final consumer, we were doing everything having that ideal final consumer in mind and we were sure that final consumer would appreciate our work.

Then, on one frosty early morning, one of the fruit retailers told us something which actually defined what business academics call a customer value proposition: "I am buying your kiwifruit because" he took one piece of kiwifruit from the box, "your fruit is zero-loss category... every single piece of daily pack-out is sold, I did not have to dump any single of your fruits."

This means that a perfect product for consumer is also a perfect trading category for retailer, our business customer. We heard many times from other retailers more or less the same opinions about how profitable and convenient business with us is, and we became even more convinced in the prime importance of focus on product and the quality.

Photo: our kiwifruit on the desk of street fruit seller

We provided with POS promotion material

One can see the stark difference between our and other fruits

Nergeta kiwifruit on the shelf of Georgian supermarket

Contact me at:

Konstantine.Vekua@nergeta.ge 

Why Quality of Product is Important, Part 1

Many companies claim that they are consumer oriented but then when you look at their product, the quality and the user experience is not what you expected. We have an impression that firms, whose products are 80% good, try to engage in various PR, charity sponsorship, reality shows to "hide what's missing". We are not that sort of company and we rather invest in product improvement than in advertising of not yet perfect product.

let us clearly state what is consumer orientation for Nergeta: 100% through quality of product and quality of experience our product gives to each consumer. Let us give a simple example: if any consumer buys 100 pieces of our fruit anywhere in Georgia, any time in sales season(weather in January, March or May), every single fruit should be without defects and no consumer should have reason to say that out of 100 fruits even one of them was different.

This is what we do to achieve such 100% satisfaction: every single kiwifruit, before shipping to the market, is hand checked by our resorting unit at the pack house. So, we sort kiwifruit twice: once, when we buy it from growers and then again before selling it. Between buying and selling there are numerous operations which consist of many nuances and our employees are taught how to take care of them. As an example, our employees do not throw kiwifruit into carton boxes on a sorting table, they put them gently with labeled side faced up.

Then, we just do not ship to market the fruit which does not have minimum 12% of sugar and maximum hardness of 2kgf. These two parameters make our consumer experience easy and tasty: cutting and slicing kiwifruit with less than 2kgf is easy and serving it with minimum sugar content of 12% is enjoyable.



We place so much importance on the quality because we think that nothing can be more assuring for our survival and profitability than hundreds of thousands of consumers who believe in our quality "even without any advertisement".

Contact me at:

Konstantine.Vekua@nergeta.ge