The celebrated 1930s central market in São Paulo is a huge grid of food stalls where locals to Brazil’s largest city come daily to shop and eat. Sellers in the fruit section seduce you with juicy slivers of fragrant guavas, papayas and Brazilian citrus fruits, and juice bars offer exotic flavours such as cupuaçu, a rainforest relation of cacao that tastes like a cross between melon, white chocolate and bubblegum. Boxfuls of beautiful mangoes are part of this tropical Eden. The variety most on show is the large Palmer mango, blushed with a dark, purply red, like a bruised sunset. Certain types of Brazilian mango are so fibrous and juicy that people massage them to pulp within the skin then make a hole in the top to suck out the fruit. But a Palmer has smooth, perfumed flesh that can survive transportation, and is popular all over this vast country and in export markets.
Bill Davies, the senior fruit buyer for Marks & Spencer, is in Brazil to meet growers of the ‘tree-ripened’ Palmer mangoes the company sells. These are harvested 20 days later than standard mangoes to give more flavour and sweetness. Launched in 2009 at M&S, the tree-ripened mango is sold cut in packets because its softness makes it difficult to transport whole. ‘It’s incredible how mangoes have grown in popularity,’ Davies says. ‘As people have travelled more and further afield, they have become more used to exotic fruits. Mango is a massive hit.’
Each year M&S sells 750,000 whole mangoes of many different varieties from around the world, though mostly from Brazil and South Africa, and 10 times as many in prepared fruit to be eaten by office workers, at home and on the go. Tree-ripened mangoes now account for five per cent of the company’s mango sales, worth millions of pounds.
The logistics of transporting tropical fruit to Britain are complex. ‘It’s easy to handle a whole standard mango,’ Davies says. ‘You just put it on a boat to the UK. But once you cut a mango it becomes difficult to handle.’ The fruit starts to give out juice from the moment it is cut, and needs to be on the shelf as soon as possible, so the supply chain must be super efficient. A ripening warehouse holding nearly 200,000 mangoes is sited near São Paulo airport. The workforce of 184 Brazilians can cut up 100 mangoes per hour per person using foot-long, razor-sharp knives in a room chilled to 5C. Tropical Fresh, the company that supplies M&S, recently built a new factory to meet growing demand.
While whole mangoes travel by sea, continuing to ripen in transit, packs of tree-ripened cut fruit go into the cargo holds of British Airways and Tam flights to London, taking 11 hours to travel 5,500 miles. They hitch a ride on existing passenger flights to make the carbon footprint less heavy and fit in with the company’s ‘Plan A’ commitment to sustainability. The fruit is on shelves around Britain within 48 hours of being cut and has a shelf life of only three days. All M&S’s tree-ripened mango comes from Brazil. ‘We picked Brazil because they can grow them year-round. It’s the size of a continent, not a country,’ Davies says. The Palmer mangoes come from eight farms, from São Paulo in the south to the more tropical north.
After visiting the factory in São Paulo we travel up to the state of Pernambuco in the north east to meet farmers at Fazenda Fortaleza. The journey includes a boat trip along the São Francisco, the fourth longest river in South America. The river’s water irrigates an otherwise arid region, enabling fruit production. On the way Davies tells me that he joined M&S as a school leaver in 1979. Now 52, he has worked in most food departments and was part of the team that launched Percy Pig, the cult fruit-juice-flavoured sweet. For him, fruit is exceptionally interesting and challenging because the most important aspect of the fruit business is the least certain: weather. It influences everything from growing and distribution to sales. Temperature makes the fruit ripen more quickly or slowly. Tropical rain can wash out the dirt-track access to a farm. As regards sales in Britain, sunshine is as important as temperature: a bright weekend can boost sales by 30 per cent and the supply chain must rev up quickly to meet demand.
At the farm we are shown around by Guilherme Secchi, 25, and Lara Secchi, 24, cousins who have entered a family business run by their fathers. They are learning about the stringent environmental and hygiene standards of M&S, with its ‘Field to Fork’ programme that focuses, for example, on water conservation and reducing pesticide use. About 40 per cent of the farm’s mangoes are now grown for export to America and Europe as the booming Brazilian economy opens up to world sales, with the Secchis’ tree-ripened fruit exclusive to M&S.
The mangoes hang on trees like outsized baubles. Like most commercial fruit trees, these have dwarf rootstock to make the crop easier to pick. Instead of harvesting in one go, workers may go six times or more to each tree to pick the fruit at its peak, when it is sweetest. The test for sweetness is done using a handheld device called a refractometer. The fruit is taken off the tree and cut, and juice is squeezed on to the instrument’s small glass plate to give a reading in Brix (sugar levels) to determine the fruit’s level of ripeness. (The concentration of sugar crystals in the liquid alters the angle of the light coming in at the top of the refractometer.) But there are other ways of assessing ripeness, such as a fruit’s shape, which swells with maturity. ‘To be ready, a mango must have shoulders,’ Jonas Spindel, a Brazilian agronomist at Tropical Fresh, explains.
It took Marks & Spencer and Tropical Fresh nine months to work out how long they could leave the mango on the tree and still be left with a commercial product. ‘We are at the limit of ripeness at which you can process a mango without it becoming too soft,’ Davies says.
Next to the ripening fruit are other trees covered in cascades of flowers awaiting pollination by ants and bees. Though only a few flowers on each stem become fruit, there will be up to 120 mangoes on each of these trees.
Tropical Fresh hopes sales of its tree-ripened mango will double next year, capitalising on current interest in Brazil, which hosts the football World Cup in 2014 and the Olympics in 2016. In its development kitchen the company has been playing around with fruit salads, working on a dipping pot of puréed pineapple, mango and Amazonian mint, and a scooped-out papaya boat filled with mango and passion fruit. M&S hasn’t gone for these so far, but who knows? Today’s tropical dream may be next year’s lunch at the office desk.
Source: The Telegraph