We Got New Measuring Tools

Professional orchard management is a little science. You depend on what's below and above your soil. You should know what is the level of critical nutrients in the soil but you should also know your soil's acidity and its water holding capacity. Many samples are sent to professional labs every year but modern times offer tools to make some express analyses right in the field.


We bought express pH tester and tensiometer from German company Stelzner. With these, we can check acidity in unlimited number of spots and we can monitor our soil's water holding capacity in several spots. Tensiometer will help us to know how much water/humidity is near the root zone and if irrigation is needed or not. It is great to know what's beneath!

Picture: Water Tensiometer in Our Kiwifruit Orchard



Berlin Fruit Exhibition: Provenance Paradox & Continuous Assurance of Quality

Picture: One of exhibitor's stand in Berlin

Every year Berlin hosts the biggest European trade exhibition of fruits and vegetables. 9000 participants and more than 50000 visitors: it is very Große. We decided to visit it to talk with our future customers, learn about their approaches and just get the sense of trading environment. We went there with the list of questions in our writing pad but for us the most important question was: What should we do to price our kiwifruit (whenever we start to export) according to its quality and taste and not according to the perceptions about the country of its origin.  

What are we talking about here? Well, while quality of the product is important, the quality is not the only factor and buying side will try to justify lower bidding price if the product comes from less known country, or less known country for that product category. Example: one Venezuelan chocolate and cocoa beans producer El Rey supplies leading European chocolate makers with its high quality cocoa but is not able to sell its own chocolate at the same or even similar prices of European chocolates made on the same very cocoa. This is called Provenance Paradox and you can get more examples and more analysis on this from Harvard professor Rohit Deshpandé here http://tinyurl.com/2bhw23x

Is this barrier impossible to overcome for Georgian companies(well, for really quality Georgian companies)? As we talk about Provenance Paradox it is worth mentioning that Swiss watches, German cars and French wines gained and keep their unrivalled reputation through continuous and uninterrupted delivery of quality and over and over and over, every single year since 1855 Château Lafite and Mercedes Benz since 1886 deliver highest imaginable and possible customer satisfaction. Customers just get used to these brands' qualities. Countries are also like brands. So we think that constant delivery of quality leads to absence of any doubts and customers start to affiliate certain products to certain companies and countries.

Georgian companies and particularly their owners and managers should "just" define quality of product as their N:1 priority, make and always keep it. Quality for customers is like a promise which you either keep or break.

Let's give an example. We see in Georgian supermarkets how some X brand puts a nice product promotional display. They look very sophisticated but if we look at some other Y company's display, we see wearing facing materials, edgy corners, glass not being rounded(one can cut a finger) etc. Customers of course notice these differences and make judgements. These judgements are in favour of the company which did not stop just at making a good chocolate and went further to offer a better display or a better packaging i.e. gave more to customers. Quality of even simple product such as fruit consists of 20, 25 or 30 nuances and all these nuances should be thought after from first year, every year.

To Contact the blogger, email:
nergeta@gmail.com 

Setting Up Windshelters

It's March and we are setting up artificial wind shelters in our orchard. They will not let occassional strong winds to break young shoots of our kiwifruit plants.


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Our Blog in Georgian Language

Just to inform our Georgian readers that we will be running blog in Georgian language and it's here: http://www.nergeta-geo.blogspot.com/

Post Driving by Machine

Kiwifruit vines cannot support themselves and wooden posts and wires are needed to support the canopy. While "inside" posts can be set manually, it is advisable to use hydraulic post driver for perimeter, end and side posts. Today we started to learn how to use this machine.

Picture: First Day of Post Driving

Video: Planting Our Kiwi

This most recent video on our YouTube channel. You see how our team is planting kiwifruits. They are placing it directly on the point marked by the bamboo pole, then make sure that the width of the hole is wide enough for the roots to fit, and also spreading roots evenly to maximize feeding area for the vine. We planted several thousand fruits that way, in the last two weeks. More images to follow.

Kiwi Planting | Live Image from Field

Here you see some impressions directly from planting. The weather is good, the sun is shining, and we are managing to get many plants into the ground, about 600 per day. More images to follow.


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We Got Plants!!!

Yesterday we got 2 year old Hayward green kiwifruit plants and this morning we started to plant them. Below you see a picture of a well developed root system of kiwifruit plant.

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Website or Facebook? How to Connect to Consumers?

We started to think about it as soon as we started to think about sales. As Facebook users ourselves with our profiles we saw how many interesting pages there were representing different companies and products. We liked (not Facebook's like but just a like as a like) some of them and we did not like (again just a pre-Facebook like) some. We thought what would people think about our page and what and how should we communicate to be likable (now both, Facebook and a real like).

We even learned that there are many firms who offer and sell to companies their consultancies on how to become popular on Facebook and how to "even measure impact of Facebook activities on sales, brand image etc".

While not being big experts on this we realised one thing from the begining: Facebook was different from website in that here (on Facebook) we should be informal to people who liked us. Unlike websites, Facebook did not look like sphere of companies but rather a sphere of individuals, people, friends. People log to Facebook to have a very informal, private chat with their friends, share funny photos and statuses, post links to various music.

So, we decided to have a page and try to post an engagable content. We also try to not post anything without relevant photo or video because we observed visual impressions are important. As someone said once: "what I saw I remember, what I heard I forgot." We did not market this a lot yet, but already have people checking in with us.



Click here to see our facebook fan page.

So, what kind of posts do we post? Here are some of examples: with our first post we put a picture of our kiwifruit being presented at one of street fruit seller's tables, and we informed our fans when we started selling and where . Then we put 4 pictures representing person (Isabel Fraser) who brought wild kiwifruit seeds to New Zealand in 1904, also a map of China, which is the homeland of kiwifruit, the picture of man after whom the most popular kiwifruit variety is named, and all these pictures were accompanied with relevant text messages. On another occasion we again put pictures of the Georgian region Samegrelo which pioneered kiwifruit into Georgia and gave a short history of kiwifruit arrival to Georgia.


We also obtained permission from New Zealand dietary expert to put her kiwifruit recipes on our fan page, published the copy of laboratory test on our kiwifruit, posted pictures from our trip to New Zealand kiwifruit growers. It is not yet about scale for us, but about using various channels to communicate that we want our consumers to be happy, and that we care for quality first and foremost.

As for the website, we decided to build this soon, to communicate with our non-consumer audience mostly such as suppliers, retailers and wholesale buyers, and other potential business partners. Coming soon.

To contact the blogger, email:
Konstantine.Vekua@nergeta.ge