Picking stick|If no pickers arrive in Finland from abroad, start looking at other options. Loreno Dalla Valle has been buying berries and mushrooms directly from Finns for years.
Refined a kilo of berries is four euros, garbage two euros. At that price Loreno Dalla Valle the company buys blueberries. Or so this was Wednesday’s price. The prices are always per day and vary.
For decades, Dalla Valle has run the company that bears his name, which buys mushrooms and berries directly from private pickers. There are shopping points all over Finland, and anyone can take their catch to them.
Thai pickers have collected about nine out of ten blueberries that end up being sold in Finland in recent years. This year is uncertainwill Thailand let pickers into the country.
If no workforce arrives from abroad, companies in the berry industry will have to think about other options. For example, how to get berry growers already in the country to sell their harvest.
That’s where an operating model like Dalla Valle can start to be interesting in the industry.
You get a better price for cleaned blueberries than for trash.
Last year berry companies bought untreated blueberries at an average price of 1.36 euros per kilo. So for a full bucket, less than a tenner was paid, and at that price not many Finns go squatting on the ground.
A lot of berries are sold through, for example, Facebook and the Tori sales site, and there the price is many times higher.
Raising the prices would certainly increase the interest in collecting, Dalla Valle estimates. However, he does not consider it realistic that the price of industrial berries would rise drastically. Foreign berry sellers also take part in the competition.
“Berries should not be sold on.”
Even the price of two euros is high, even if the pickers are not enthusiastic about it. You can’t beat him for less than two euros.
“It would be the same as zero euros, no one would come.”
However, blueberry is not Dalla Valle’s main product, but a supplement that is bought along with the mushroom trade. He considers the fact that the picker can sell the mushrooms and berries in the same place to be a selling point.
At the core of the company are the delicacy tatties, which Dalla Valle estimates he buys hundreds of thousands of kilos of. Most of them end up in Italy and Germany.
Loreno Dalla Valle has been running the business of buying and selling mushrooms for decades.
Big large-scale buying and selling operations are not built in an instant, says Dalla Valle. His company has fixed points of sale and traveling shopping vans that drive in several provinces.
A network is not built in a day, he believes.
“Yes, it requires serious experience.”
Most of the pickers arriving at the points are Finnish pensioners, Dalla Valle estimates. The second group is the middle-aged, who schedule their summer vacation during the Tattika season. Thirdly, the points are visited by professional pickers who weigh a long day in the terrain. Families with children visit on weekends.
He estimates that the blueberry year will be difficult for industry players, but the mushroom year looks bright to him.
For the second year in a row, a lot of chanterelles seem to be growing, and the weather promises to be good for gourmet teas, according to him.
“It was already warm in May. The secret is a long winter, and then first warm and lots of rain. If it rains for a couple of days at the end of the week, at the end of the following week, tatters will rise.”
#Picking #pin #Berry #mushroom #entrepreneur #kilo #blueberries #cost #euros
