AAA Growers' first sea freight Hass avocados arrived at the Al Aweer Market, Dubai last week.
"The product sold quickly due to the excellent quality," said Paul Huish, Commercial Manager at the company. "Kenya generally has a bad name in the market, but we are doing things differently. Fruit is coming from our own orchards and we check dry matter levels religiously in the field before harvesting."
AAA Growers was started by Farah and Ariff Shamji in 2000. In 2010 they purchased Simba Farm, located close to the town of Nyahururu. They currently have 100 hectares in production and wish to plant a further 100 hectares. All trees come from AAA Growers' nursery Elite Plants.
The building of the pack house commenced during the Covid pandemic which caused quite a few delays regarding delivery of equipment. The state of the art pack house has a four lane pack line, storage capacity for 8 x 40ft container of product and pre cooling for 2 x 40 ft containers, an INTRECO 2 chamber ripening facility.
"We wish to revolutionize the way produce is sold from Kenya. We want to ripen at source and supply markets worldwide. We remove field-heat out of the product as soon as possible and with our various cold rooms we are able to store fruit at different temperatures according to dry matter content."
Sea freight from Mombasa can take 14 – 21 days depending on the line and sailing schedules. Like so many others in the industry shipping is proving challenging for AAA Growers, the first containers had a delay of 5 days and a direct sailing was re-routed via India.
AAA Growers expect to export around 345 tons this season. As well as having their own avocado production, AAA Growers also source from two other large growers and export around the world.
For more information:
Paul Huish
AAA Growers
[email protected]