Chileans Should Pay for Their Own Lunch  
by Ken Lindauer, Red Bluff CA
July 22, 2008
 
Our industry is quite concerned with the Chilean industry's ability to take advantage of our prune promotion in Europe. Not only are they benefiting from the product awareness our promotions create in Europe, but they also reduce prices (in addition to their 9.6% import tax advantage) to take market share away from California. "They are eating our lunch" as some like to put it.   
 
When Jennette Higgs spoke at our recent Nutrition Subcommittee about the new EU European Food Standards Agency (EFSA) regulations, she gave me an idea that there might be a way for us to take advantage of these new regulations that will not go into effect until 2010. Even though these regulations address Food Labeling, it could open a "food safety" door for us. 
 
With a little ingenuity on our part, we could build up not only the quality but also the “clean” aspects of our California prunes where 100% of our fruit never touches the ground, are rinsed with clean water before drying and sterilized in 185-degree hot air tunnels. We know that 85% of the Chilean prunes are picked from the ground and dried in the sun. They are not cleaned or rinsed before sun drying.  The 14-day exposure to all the wildlife and air pollution in the surrounding dry yard areas may have some contaminating effect. With proper promotion we should be able to stress the cleanliness of California prunes to the European traders in a way that would make them aware of potential food safety liability in purchasing other product.
 
Chileans will continue to rely on the sun for drying the majority of their fruit because of their extremely limited supply of natural gas. This could create a strong and lasting food safety campaign for our CA prunes - and help restore market share to California.