As more South Africans buy groceries online, fruit growers face a new problem: persuading shoppers to buy produce they cannot see, touch or check for ripeness. For avocado growers, speakers at the South African Subtropical Growers' Association (Subtrop) marketing symposium in Skukuza, Mpumalanga, said last week, building that confidence may matter as much as promoting the fruit's health benefits.
Craig Swartz, head of sales at Rainmaker Media, the retail media agency of the Shoprite Group, said shoppers were visiting physical stores less often as they turned to delivery services such as Checkers Sixty60. Shoprite's latest trading figures showed Sixty60 sales up 33.4 percent in the four months to the end of October, after sales of R25.5 billion in the year to the end of June 2026. Swartz said suppliers now need their products to appear prominently in online searches rather than relying on attractive in-store displays, while retailers collect ever more detailed data on what customers buy and how often.
Prof Roland Goldberg of North-West University, a specialist in consumer behaviour, explained that supermarkets put fresh produce near the entrance because its appearance shapes how shoppers judge the whole store. Online, those influences disappear. "Products whose names aren't entered into the search bar remain invisible to shoppers," he said. Buyers rely instead on the information and pictures online and on their past experience of the product.
That is a particular challenge for avocados, where ripeness decides the purchase. Goldberg said shoppers may say they buy avocados for their health benefits, but at the moment of buying their concern is whether the fruit will be ripe when they need it. Ripe-and-ready fruit offers certainty, he said, but that trust takes time to build, and one black, stringy avocado stays in a shopper's memory far longer than a perfect one.
Luzanne Kurtz, Westfalia Fruit's global sourcing manager for avocados, warned that poor fruit damages confidence in the whole industry, not only in one supplier, and cautioned against letting standards slip late in the season when there is pressure to move fruit. Subtrop chairperson Edrean Ernst, in an address delivered by chief executive Derek Donkin, said stimulating demand must go together with delivering fruit that meets expectations: "Quality is not solely the responsibility of packhouses; it begins on the farm."
Glynnis Branthwaite, founder of Protactic Strategic Communications, said campaigns such as Subtrop’s "Add an Avo" increasingly use simple messages to add the fruit to everyday meals, backed by health information and recipes. Goldberg’s observations show why consistent eating quality still matters: as more grocery buying moves online, shoppers’ confidence in what they order will decide whether marketing turns into repeat purchases and lasting demand.
Photo: Edrean / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0)
Source: Farmers Weekly South Africa
Comments
(0)