Zimbabwe’s citrus exporter benefits from efficient on-farm cold room for export-grade fruits.
The Zimbabwean horticultural sector is growing rapidly in response to the increasing demand for fresh fruit and vegetables in the European Union, UK, Middle East, far East and regional markets. The industry has a competitive advantage with its favourable climate conditions and off-season production of high-value crops in high demand such as blueberries, avocados, citrus and peas. To meet export standards, Zimbabwean growers and exporters are heavily investing in on-farm and near-farm cooling infrastructure to meet food safety standards, meet quality requirements and reduce losses and claims.
This is the case of AshFresh Farming, a Zimbabwean registered private company, involved in the production and export of high-quality fresh avocados and citrus for the European, Middle Eastern and Asian markets, based in Centenary, Zimbabwe.
Founded in 2019, AshFresh put up their first orchards of avocados on 150 ha, and soft citrus on 83 ha, both targeting the European markets. As soon as the fruit trees were up, Graeme Webb, the Managing Director began the search for a packhouse and cold storage facility with pre-coolers and holding cold rooms to meet the required export cold chain requirements.
AshFresh’s efficient cooling protocols for citrus exports
According to Graeme, a priority for them was to find a service provider, who could grow with them, as they expanded their operations.
“We knew that we would be expanding our production acreage as we grew. This meant that we would also need to expand our packhouse and cold rooms as our production grew. For this reason, we were looking for a supplier who would walk and grow with us.”
The InspiraFarms Cooling solution.
In 2022, InspiraFarms Cooling installed a packhouse, which consisted of:
- Three 3 pre-cooling rooms to cool down up to 20,000 KG of fruits from +25°C to +5°C in 12 hours when combined with a forced air-pre-cooling system.
- Two holding cold rooms to hold 24 and 56 pallets of already refrigerated and palletised produce
- 1 refrigerated passage to manoeuvre and temporarily store refrigerated palletised avocados and citrus.
AshFresh’s cooling process within the packhouse involves harvesting their citrus from the farm, precooling them for 12 hours, before placing them in the cold room for 8 hours and into the +4°C passageway, and further loading them into +4 °C for dispatch.
Flexible and convenient financing for their cold room needs.
In long-term projects like this, investing in high-value machinery often requires a significant upfront cost, which can be challenging to manage all at once. That’s why AshFresh found the flexible financing service by InspiraFarms Cooling to be a major advantage.
“Financially, a big selling point for us was the flexible financing service, which meant that InspiraFarms Cooling worked hard with their financial partner SunFunder to get us the finance deal that would allow us to pay it off over 5 years, as opposed to upfront all in one sum. Also, Michele Bruni, the Chief Commerical Officer has a huge fountain of knowledge, especially when it comes to cold chain, and particularly cooling techniques. This meant that at the end of the process, we got a design that worked for us and our operations.” says Graeme.
In January 2022, China and Zimbabwe signed an export protocol agreement to export fresh citrus fruits from Zimbabwe to China. The agreement would allow fresh citrus including sweet orange, mandarin, grapefruit, lemon, and lime, to enter China.
For Graeme, this is a great opportunity to explore new markets since China could be a good potential market for their citrus fruits. In the meantime, their expansion to new products, including avocados is in the pipeline.
“I have walked into many cold rooms here in Zimbabwe and I have not seen anything like this state-of-the-art facility. I have no complaints about the product since it is very very efficient. As our volumes and orchards increase, we would need additional cold rooms and the modular nature means we can mirror what we have got during our expansion. At this moment, the solution we have can meet our capacities till 2026, where we expect to put up a new set of cold rooms during our expansion towards the end of 2026.”
In conclusion
As Zimbabwe’s horticultural sector continues to expand, driven by rising demand for fresh produce in international markets, companies like AshFresh are at the forefront, ensuring quality and compliance with strict export standards, through investments in cooling solutions. If you are looking for a similar solution to enhance your post-harvest operations, get a quote here.
