Dried fruit, juicy prospects

Adam Brett built a thriving business with  the backing of a few smallholders from a war-stricken Uganda. He talks to Kay Sexton about solar drying, sales and sustainability.

“If it’s not raisins, you won’t sell it.” This was the advice Adam Brett received from wholesalers when he tried to sell sun-dried bananas in Britain in the early 90s. But a group of farmers in Uganda thought otherwise, backing Adam with their own savings. Today, you’ll find Brett’s bananas – along with apricots, walnuts and almonds from the mountainous Hunza Valley of northern Pakistan – on the shelves of retail giants such as Tesco and Morrisons.

Getting Tropical Wholefoods off the ground wasn’t easy. When wholesalers refused to take on a product that wasn’t raisins, Adam and his partner Kate Sebag, co-founder of the company, had to find a way to sell their Ugandan imports directly to the consumer. They turned to the London markets, doing six or seven shifts a week at Spitalfields, Camden and Portobello – and then dipping their toes into Glastonbury, WOMAD and even the Henley Royal Regatta: “We went wherever there was a crowd, because everyone from grannies to hippies likes dried fruit.”

Sales escalated in 1993, when they convinced a handful of health food shops across the UK, from Infinity Foods in Brighton to Green City in Edinburgh, to take on their fruit. Then, in 1996, Tropical Wholefoods struck a deal with cereal bar specialist Fulwell Mill to make dried fruit and honey snacks. They still go back to the markets though. As Adam explains, “It’s really useful to have that face-to-face contact, even if we only pitch our stall once every couple of weeks.”

“The war had just come to an end and the country was in ruins. I thought it would be good to do something positive”

Adam’s motivation grew out of a trip he took in the late 80s as a young graduate, back to his birthplace, Uganda. “The brutal civil war had just come to an end and the country was in ruins. I thought it’d be good to do something positive and useful.” With no capital at all, Adam had only his training as an economist to invest. He used it to engage a few farmers he already knew there, mostly friends of his family, demonstrating how exporting their fruit to the UK could get them a good return on investment, and making them an offer they couldn’t refuse: “There were so few opportunities to earn money back then. I proposed to buy a set amount of fruit, for an agreed sum, before it was even on the tree, so really there was little for them to lose.”

The agreement worked out well on all sides. For Tropical Wholefoods, it was a good mechanism for securing loyalty among the producers, and allowed them to market their products as fairtrade in the UK. For the producers, knowing how much money they were going to get meant they could plan and expand accordingly.

“As soon as the producers began to make a profit, investment shot up. There were so few opportunities to spend money that at first they didn’t know what to do with it. Most reinvested straight away.”

Each producer made an initial investment in a small-scale solar dryer, a simple device to channel the sun’s heat, consisting of a long wooden frame with slatted racks, covered in gauze to keep out pests and protect the fruit from dust and showers. The dryers meant that the producers could both grow and process the fruit, adding to the value of their produce. They also meant vast savings on transport for Tropical Wholefoods.

“As soon as producers began to make a profit, investment shot up”

“Take the example of mangoes,” Adam explains. “You have hundreds of smallholders in East Africa, connected by poor roads to your fruit-processing site. You’ll need to spend a minimum of £50,000 on a lorry to gather the fruit – and it won’t last more than a year on those roads. Now, you could put 20 tonnes of fresh mangoes in that lorry, ruin half of them on the way, and dispose of your waste at the processing site. Or, you could ask each farmer to peel and stone the mangoes at the smallholding, putting the waste straight back onto the field. The farmer plants the solar dryer within walking distance to the trees and processes the juicy morsels right there. Then you load just one tonne of dried fruit onto your lorry. It saves fuel and means you can pick the fruit much closer to ripeness, so the taste is really great.”

Adam admits that food miles are a concern for the company as Sri Lanka, Tanzania and Burkina Faso join a growing list of partner countries, but he argues that the benefits of transporting lighter dried produce also apply to the export process. There isn’t the same urgency as for fresh fruit that is flown into UK supermarkets, and so Adam minimises the carbon footprint of his products by sea-freighting the fruit in unrefrigerated container ships. As Adam sees it, ‘buying local’ is only part of the answer to climate change. “We also need to consider the growing, transport and production processes that bring us fairly traded foodstuffs, while securing a market for farmers in developing countries.”

Building on this ideal, Adam added dried porcini and oyster mushrooms to the Tropical Wholefoods ‘menu’. He explains that exporting dried mushrooms for the UK market means a secure income for women who were struggling to sell fresh ones locally – and, by agreeing the quantity and the price in advance, they know what that income will be.

“The injustice in the commodities market is that, as the price of the produce fluctuates, so does the income of the producers, even if the amount of produce sold is the same. At least Tropical Wholefoods always returns to them a given sum.”

Like every other entrepreneur, Adam is watching the economic downturn. “The big problem is that our purchasing power has declined with the pound, and the supermarkets are asking us to lower our prices.” In spite of the current strain, Adam’s bullish about his prospects. “The great thing about our relationships with the producers is that there are guarantees on both sides. We know how much fruit we have to sell and can plan for that. And, overall, our sales have held up. I’m actually hoping they’ll improve over 2009.” He has numerous strategies to bolster them, including the introduction of a new snack – roasted apricot kernels flavoured with chilli – and a rebranding exercise with bold colours and a sun logo to draw attention to the use of solar energy.

“I’ve seen it all before,” he says, harking back to the early 90s when he was just starting up. “In the last recession, wholefood and healthfoods remained growing markets because those who cut down on meals out and holidays turned their attention to eating well at home. There’s no guarantee that history will repeat itself, but I feel reasonably confident that the food market will be robust.”

1 May 2009

Anna Simpson and Kay Sexton