“We are pretty excited by that total,” said Giovanni Cavaletto, CEO and president of the U.S. based division. “The Farmworker Committee in Jalisco will now determine how to best invest those funds generated by Fairtrade sales.”
Cavaletto was very pleased by the response he received from U.S. retailers concerning the Fairtrade program. “When I first tried to involve companies in the Fairtrade programs (several years ago), it was very difficult to put together the critical mass needed for a sustained program,” he said. “You could get Fairtrade volume for two or three weeks at a time, but you couldn’t put together the kind of program a retailer likes.”
Working with Grupo Los Cerritos, the Jalisco based grower-shipper organization that Cavaletto joined in 2023, has allowed him to have a continuous supply of Fairtrade-certified fruit. He revealed that GLC is the fifth largest supplier of Mexican avocados to the U.S. market, with fruit from Jalisco gaining access to the U.S. market several years ago creating the perfect situation for the large grower-shipper.
In 2024, Cavaletto said the bulk of the Fairtrade fruit that GLC Cerritos offered its customers arrived in the U.S. market in the last three or four months of the calendar year, from September into December. “This year we want to start it with the beginning of our volume in June and July and take it through the fall,” he said. “We plan to put together a five- or six-month program for our customers.”
He revealed that those 2 million pounds of Fairtrade avocados were marketed in three different sizes to two different customers and generated about $40,000 in Fairtrade funds for the farmworker community in Jalisco.
Cavaletto reminded that besides Fairtrade certification, all 3,000 acres of GLC’s avocado groves in Jalisco have achieved Global G.A.P. certification, which he said only applies to about 1 percent of Mexico’s avocado groves.
Speaking specifically of the company’s improvements, Cavaletto said GLC Cerritos now offers a full portfolio of avocado packs and categories through its ripening and distribution facility in South Texas. “In order to be a category leader, you have to offer a full lineup of options,” he said, noting that the company sells organic and conventional avocados in both bags and bulk, as well as pre-conditioned fruit. “We have a ripening program in South Texas and we have also installed eight new bagging machines in our Jalisco facility.”
Surveying the supply situation from Mexico for the next several months, Cavaletto expects the volume to be on the lean side through late spring and into early summer. He added that GLC Cerritos should start picking the 2025/26 crop from its Jalisco trees earlier than most with its Mendez variety, which he described as an early Hass variety. “It looks like a Hass. I can’t tell them apart, but the Mendez fruit comes on a little earlier.”
He also mentioned that Armando Garcia, the company’s director of sustainability, is working with a product called BloomX, a bio-mimicking pollination technology, to increase fruit set and productivity, allowing for a more robust crop.
GLC Cerritos noted that the decline of natural pollinators due to habitat loss, climate change and pesticide use poses a serious challenge to global agriculture, particularly for crops like avocados, which heavily depend on pollination for optimal yields.
In response, GLC Cerritos has launched a pilot program to evaluate the effectiveness of BloomX’s Crossbee artificial pollination technology in its orchards in Ciudad Guzmán, Jalisco. The BloomX’s Crossbee system seeks to replicate the pollination mechanism of stingless bees, using high-voltage electrostatic technology to collect and transfer pollen efficiently.
This pilot study is assessing whether this technology can:
- Enhance avocado production by increasing pollination efficiency.
- Improve pollination efficiency to enhance fruit quality, promoting better size and uniformity.
- Provide data-driven insights to refine pollination management strategies.
The company noted that this trial marks the first phase of implementation, with results guiding future decisions on its scalability. Previous trials in other regions have shown yield increases of up to 57 percent, but this pilot program will determine the specific benefits for GLC Cerritos’s avocado orchards under local conditions.
