BioFach 2023: Tradin Organic unveils Ethiopian avocado project

17 Feb 2023 --- At BioFach 2023, Tradin Organic, a global supplier of organic ingredients, presented its ongoing efforts to provide sustainable, traceable ingredients to suppliers. Tradin showcased Sunvado, its avocado oil project in Ethiopia.

FoodIngredientsFirst spoke with Karst Kooistra, sourcing development director of Tradin Organic, on the trade show floor in Nuremberg, Germany, earlier this week.

“We have a new project around avocado oil, which we have built in Ethiopia,” he says. “It contains a factory and over 4,000 farmers.”

Sunvado will produce organic extra virgin avocado oil and refined avocado oil for the market. The former has many applications from high heat frying to low heat, dipping, dressing and personal care applications. 

The latter is cold pressed and has a fatty acid profile similar to Mediterranean olive oil, and is stable, versatile, and suitable for both home cooking and industrial applications.

“It’s a successful project with a huge social and environmental impact.”

The Sunvado project focuses on providing an export market for the Ethiopian avocado farmers, which they previously lacked. 

Sunvado works with 32,000 smallholder farmers and has helped them to set up organic certification, which allows them to set a premium organic price for the avocados they produce.

The avocados are not grown in plantations, but rather as trees to provide shade for coffee farms. Whereas these avocados were once sold at the local market for low prices, Tradin Organic’s new facility allows the produce to be sold at a higher price and to a wider organic market.

Karst Kooistra, sourcing development director for Tradin Organic, discusses the new Ethiopian avocado project, vegetable proteins and food chain digitization.Plant proteins
Talking on current trends in the organic market, Kooistra notes that the growth of plant-based foods is leading to increased demand for vegetable proteins.

“One of the products that is gaining more interest is vegetable proteins, which can come from many sources, beans especially,” he says. 

“That is then processed into meat replacements. Plant-based producers are coming to us to produce meat replacements that are also organic. Plant-based started at conventional. Now it’s moving into organic.” 

“We expect this trend to continue, so long as the price and quality levels are maintained.” 

Digitization of food chains
Tradin Organic’s  plans for 2023 will focus on educating consumers and implementing one of the main themes of BioFach 2023 - the digitization of supply chains.

“For 2023, we want to keep informing our customers of what is going on and what we can expect in terms of the market and supply. There are certainly issues, like climate change, which must be addressed,” flags Kooistra.

“There’s also the issue of the digitization of supply chains, which is an exciting thing going on this year. Traceability is one of the most important things,” he continues. 

“As an organic consumer, you need to know that what you are buying is coming from an organic field. A lot of the work in tracing is still done on paper, which is very laborious. Digitization saves a lot of time and equips producers with the ability to analyze their supply chain.”

Organic produce demand continues
Kooistra expanded on consumer demand for organic produce, saying, “We were expecting a kind of decline, but we do see that a lot of people keep choosing organic products.” 

“We think this is motivated by the quality and the environmental aspect of organic foods.” 

Consumers interested in organic produce are primarily motivated by the health of both themselves and the environment. 

By James Davies, live from BioFach, Nuremberg