20 JANUARY 15, 2017 Good Fruit Grower www.goodfruit.com
T
he fruit industry uses the term "quality" all
the time, but it means different things to
different people. When it comes to apples,
for example, shoppers value crispness, while
packers think highly of, say, shelf life.
Karina Gallardo and some fellow economists have
figured out a way to measure those variances, thus
quantifying something otherwise usually dismissed as
subjective.
Through surveys of packers, growers and con-
sumers, Gallardo, a Washington State University
associate professor of economics, and a nationwide
team of researchers have assigned monetary values to
the importance the different groups placed on a variety
of quality attributes of apples, sweet cherries, peaches,
strawberries and tart cherries.
Their most surprising result — "the one that made us
jump to the ceiling, the whole team," said Gallardo at the
Washington State Tree Fruit Association annual meeting
in December in Wenatchee, Washington — was that the
preferences of growers and consumers lined up, while
the packers were the odd man out.
Where do you match
consumer expectations?
Economists quantify importance of fruit qualities based on
differing perspectives of producers, packers and consumers.
by Ross Courtney
Karina Gallardo
