The company revealed that the digital marketing efforts have driven 2.3 million impressions across Autumncrisp branded social media accounts. For 2024, Sun World International will expand to in-store marketing, as well as local market pilot campaigns. “What happens in Vegas won’t stay in Vegas this time, as Autumncrisp branded grapes are now set to become a global culinary phenomenon,” said Jennifer Sanchez, Sun World’s vice president of marketing.
This Autumncrisp marketing campaign is Sun World’s first effort at promoting one of its varietal success stories since selling its farming and marketing operations five years ago and focusing its attention on its breeding programs. Sun World was long a leader in the marketing of its fresh produce crops. It has now turned that marketing expertise toward its proprietary varieties.
Several members of Sun World’s executive leadership team recently spoke with The Produce News, exploring that decision five years ago as well as the circumstances that led to this recent marketing effort.
“For nearly half a century, Sun World has been focused on bringing consumers more flavorful and novel fresh fruits and vegetables. We’ve done that in myriad ways, from contract breeding and research with public institutions and operating large California-based farming operations to developing one of the world’s most successful table grape and stonefruit breeding and licensing businesses,” said Chief Executive Officer David Marguleas.
He added that while genetics and produce innovation were always a centerpiece of the company’s value proposition, focusing its efforts solely on that pursuit allowed the company to focus on that aspect of its business and develop a range of improved varieties of table grapes and stone fruit.
Over the past five years, Marguleas noted that there have been hurdles to overcome, including pandemic-induced supply chain issues, along with many extraordinary weather situations. “The weather events have inspired us to ‘double down’ on climate resilience as a key criterion in our breeding endeavors,” he said.
The company has experienced successes with its varietal programs leading Marguleas to indicate that the decision five years ago was a good one. “Demand for our varieties amongst producers and consumers alike, and support for our varietal branding efforts, continue to grow,” he said. “While we are proud of our global footprint and encouraged by the difference we are making in literally thousands of growers’ operations worldwide, we remain laser-focused on bringing more innovation across the broader fruit category to the global produce industry and their customers.”
Specifically discussing the proprietary varietal marketing effort, Sanchez reported that the international company works with more than 150 marketers and 2,700 growers across the globe. “Sun World’s Autumncrisp brand green seedless grapes have been steadily gaining popularity with growers, retailers and consumers,” she said.
She noted that the grapes are grown in 15 countries, which provides availability throughout the year. The goal is to improve the consumer grape experience through consistent branding, continuous availability and top-quality product.
“To accomplish this, we developed a fully integrated marketing campaign that drives consumer awareness and premiumization of Autumncrisp grapes to mitigate variety overload at the shelf and ensure table grapes are not just seen as a commodity category.”
The company is tracking its success with the use of various metrics, including tracking branded packaging adoption at the grower level, growth of adoption rates at retail and sales data benchmarking. “On the consumer side, consumer brand awareness research, media impressions and social engagement are key indicators,” she said. “The campaign started with a heavy research lift and continues to evolve based on results, consumer and retailer feedback, and engagement.”
Sanchez agreed that Autumncrisp does have certain characteristics that lend itselves to the marketing campaign that Sun World has launched. It achieved significant global presence with increasing volumes across key table grape growing regions, making year-round availability possible. “The crisp texture, sweet taste and juiciness are key attributes that consumers are looking for and that Autumncrisp delivers. Retailer interest continues to grow due to the high-quality, year-round availability, and increase in consumer requests for Autumncrisp. These factors all work together and provide an opportunity for branded promotions to increase in the future.”
Sanchez said it is Sun World’s goal to impact grape marketing at retail to facilitate varietal promotions. Typically, grapes have been marketed by color rather by variety. “Sun World’s efforts, and those of our amazing marketers and growers, aim to break the variety overload of the grape display at shelf by working with retailers to highlight the Autumncrisp brand,” she said. “We are working with select retailers this year to roll out a branded campaign execution at shelf along with consumer advertising that will take many shapes, depending on the needs of the retailer and market dynamics. Reshaping the grape market will take time, but with the success of the campaign thus far, we see a huge opportunity ahead.”
Jennifer Petersen, executive vice president and chief science officer, remarked that Autumncrisp does not stand alone as a Sun World variety that can be promoted to consumers in the fruit category. “From a strategic perspective, the coming five years will see our customers reaping the significant benefits of a decade-long diversification push at Sun World, both within our core categories, table grape and stone fruit, and in planning for adjacent crop expansion.”
She added that the breeding programs’ emphasis on using technology to innovate has led to ambitious varietal development. “Our customers will have access to the industry’s most robust portfolio of new, high-margin, field-tested grape, cherry and stone fruit varieties along with varieties in new categories such as mango,” she said.
In fact, the grape category has many future candidates for robust marketing campaigns. “We continue to build-on the runaway success of Sugrathirtyfive marketed as Autumncrisp. That excitement continues to build with Sugrafiftythree marketed as Ruby Rush. Sugrafiftyfour, a mid-season green seedless variety with an intriguing muscat flavor, and a good natural performance with fewer grower inputs, is also gaining in popularity. And Sugrasixty, a mid-season red variety with an appealing tropical flavor and a cluster that is easy-to-manage in terms of color and labor requirements, is a very attractive option.”
Petersen said the cherry breeding program has two new early, low-chill cherry varieties: Sucherry2 and Sucherry3, that are in testing and that are generating interest from growers as well as a new mid-chill variety, Sucherryone.
Sun World recently announced its new mango variety, Kankun, which Petersen said “is a beautiful fruit with a red blush, thin skin and low fiber content that has limited availability in Mexico. Sun World will have trees available under license in 2024.”
Petersen also commented on some breeding hurdles and opportunities. She said developing varieties that will perform well given climate change is and will remain the answer to any question about major breeding challenges. “The frequency of unusual weather events globally has massively accelerated our focus on evaluating a new variety’s performance,” she said. “We’re evolving our variety testing program and variety performance data to better assess a variety’s resilience across years and locations. Incorporating climate resiliency into our varieties will be rewarding for the entire value chain as we create a more reliable product pipeline that delivers increasingly climate resilient varieties.”
Improving fruit quality and post-harvest traits to ensure that varieties are also resilient to supply chain fluctuations is another stated goal of the company’s breeding efforts.
With the advent of new breeding technologies, there is also the potential for more targeted approaches to breeding, including gene editing. Petersen noted the work in these areas and hopes that consumer acceptance will follow. “Genome-editing technologies like CRISPR burst on the scene and were fueled by Nobel Prize-winning advancements in chemistry in 2010. We’re starting to see the application of these truly game-changing technologies in ag with foods that deliver a higher nutritional profile,” she said, adding that the broad adoption of these technologies will largely depend on consumer understanding and acceptance.
She pointed with optimism to a recent consumer survey that revealed taste, appearance, and pesticide levels were more important to the consumer than whether the grapes were bred using gene-editing. “Our sense is that when genome editing can deliver products with a strong value proposition to the consumer, people will make increasingly informed decisions and acceptance and adoption will follow,” Petersen said.
