In a vast greenhouse in Agadir, Southern Morocco, fresh produce buyer Mohammed Basheer holds up one of the Sekoya Pop® blueberries grown, harvested and packed here for the Spain-based company Surexport. The berry itself looks almost as big as a cherry between Basheer’s fingers. “The Sekoya Pop® is a selected premium variety known for its large size,” he says. “It has a crisp texture and intense flavour, sweetness with a hint of tanginess. It also travels very nicely, maintaining its quality and freshness from farm to shelf.”
The market for blueberries in general, and this variety in particular, has been growing as well as the fruit itself, as more consumers adopt healthy, nutritious eating and snacking habits. “They’re perfect for putting in breakfast bowls and smoothies,” says Basheer, who also puts them in his son’s lunchbox. Now he pops this one in his mouth, too. “Amazing,” he says.
Blueberry plants are relatively easy to grow and manage
Harvesting begins as early as January in Morocco
Planting blueberries (and raspberries) across nine farms here in Agadir, and many others in Northern Morocco, Peru and Mexico – with a planting programme soon to begin in India – allows Surexport to grow much further afield than the company’s original base in Huelva, Spain. As CEO Andrés Morales Vilar puts it, this strategy equates to greater “availability”.
“Sekoya Pop® has the taste and crunchiness that our customers like,” he says, “and when they like something, they want to be able to buy it always. ”While the blueberry harvest in Spain runs from March to May, and Peru has a much longer season from June or July to December, the Moroccan farms start picking as early as January, helping to ensure a year-round supply. For quality manager Zakaria Mao, part of the year is taken up with the various certifications required to comply with agreed social and environmental standards, not to mention water management. In this dry region, says Zakaria, “we are constantly looking for better agricultural practices to optimise the use of water and all our natural resources.”
Supply to the Agadir operation comes from both the ocean and from boreholes, and while the job brings fairly constant challenges, the blueberry is a fairly resilient fruit. “It’s very easy to manage the quality, compared to raspberries. They don’t have the same issues.” Once the harvest begins, “blueberries are carefully picked at our greenhouses, collected by our refrigerated trucks and taken to our packhouse. This operation must take less than one hour from the moment the fruit is picked in our fields.”
Sekoya Pop® is a premium variety that stands out for its crisp texture and intense flavour
These blueberries are available across Spinneys stores
Overseas sales manager Cristian Morales deals with all such markets outside Europe, from partners such as Spinneys in the Middle East to Southeast Asia and Canada. In his five years at Surexport he has come to think of the company as a “little-big family business” that reaches around the world but remains “focused on the final customer”.
Sekoya Pop® was developed with that customer in mind, emerging as a maximally appealing variety from the lengthy and expensive process that such breeding programmes tend to entail. “It’s such a nice variety, so nice to eat but also travels so well, arriving at the final destination in the same good shape that you see here in the crops,” says Cristian.
The berries here have a slight white bloom on them, which is perfectly natural and even edible – you can wipe it off or eat it as it comes, as Cristian does while he speaks. “Some years ago, people didn’t know much about this kind of fruit, but as society becomes more aware of the importance of how we eat, they want more and more of it. Blueberries are antioxidants with a great flavour that we sell in tubes that you can take to work or school.”
Sekoya Pop® travels well, keeping its plump shape
Cristian Morales, overseas sales manager
Sekoya Pop® is so good, in fact, that it makes older varieties of blueberry seem less appealing. Which begs the question, is there some new variety in the pipeline that might turn out even better? “That’s going to be difficult, honestly,” admits Cristian. “Sekoya Pop® is crunchy in ways that was quite new for blueberries, and the shelf life is amazing.”
“So the real challenge is to develop an even newer and better variety. But we like challenges, and we join the best breeding programmes. We’re testing now, and we’re on the way.”
