Greece has suddenly become famous and important. Following musings culled from a fairly recent study compiled by ‘International Food and Agribusiness Management Association’ might offer some lessons for fruit and vegetable retail anywhere.

Looking at expenses in f+v retail, the biggest cost is the purchase of goods bought for resale. This cost is highest at 82.9% in Greece. Expenses for wages and salaries also vary widely between countries. This expense is on a very lower side, a mere 3.4% in Greece. Other expense (which includes rents or lease payments) is also lowest in Greece at 5.6%. Overall, total expenses amount to between 92.0% of operating income. Consequently, Gross margins are just 17.1 % and operating profit margin is 8% of operating income. The apparent gross profit (in monetary unit) per shop earned is also lowest in Greece.

Now juxtapose above information with other fact that Greece has one of the highest densities in the world for f+v exclusive shops and the number of shops is still increasing. Lower gross margin (17.1%) can probably be explained by the higher F&V shop density in Greece, which results in higher competition and thus reduced pricing power for shop owners but increasing the bargaining power of suppliers. This perhaps explains high cost of purchase of goods – too many shops competing for same goods.

From a con­sumer’s point of view, however, such the Greek situation may be ideal – many shops and low prices, which may partly contribute to the high per capita F&V consumption rate in Greece, which was one of the highest as per 2003 (the most recent available year) FAOSTAT consumption data across the world.

It has been strongly argued that there may be a link between a country’s retail system and its f+v consumption level. Greece demonstrates that. The more highly differentiated the supply structure of F&V, the easier it will be to consume them, provided no other constraints such as low incomes or high prices exist.

Now what are the lessons here?

I was recently reprimanded and asked to delete couple of casually clicked fruit and vegetable display photographs at a French retailer’s hypermarket in Muscat.

Can a retailer keep a secret as innocent as fresh produce display that, as a customer, I wanted momentarily to capture for posterity. How much this retailer would have gained (as free publicity) or lost  (trade secret) through those photograph of beautiful display by local staff is anybody’s guess.

Someone has rightly said – ”Retail is combat sport”. The biggest problem with retail is lack of transparency of the business. Sam Walton spent thousands of hours inside his competitors’ stores. It’s virtually impossible to have any trade secrets in retailing. Your competitors can walk into your stores and, in about 15 minutes, understand your entire business-model advantage and how to replicate it. There are very few industries that are as openly transparent, and that’s problematic for retail business.“Location, location, location” and “retail is detail” does not seem too much of a competitive advantage. Perhaps, because of this, retail is a low margin business with little margin for error.

National Company for Agricultural & Livestock Development LLC. Nothing unusual about this Omani company’s name. Agreed. Nothing is unusual about Mr Abdus Sattar Basra, too who manages this company.  Except that he is a Kapurthala born poet at heart, taught agriculture till mid nineties in Oman after coming from Pakistan in 1961. It is amazing that he has single handedly transformed the 100 odd acres of barren land in proximity of sea (high humidity) into an all year round techno-production heaven for all kind of vegetables.

Hats off to you Mr. Sattar and to your grit and determination. You have really shown that environment is no limitation if  you want to do it and know how to do it and have patience to harvest the fruit of your labor.

In the age of supermarkets, traditional bazaars and street vendors are still major players in fruit and vegetable distribution if one considers quantities sold, distribution reach and employment. Yet supermarket numbers are increasing as a result of incentives that promote ideals of food safety and modernization, in stark contrast to their negative response to street vending, vendors and informal markets that are still mired with low returns.

Street vending and traditional markets generate more employment by volume of business than supermarkets, particularly for the poor. As the majority of the poor are concentrated in rural areas, and rely on agriculture and vegetable growing for the majority of their earnings, it is inevitable that changes to food production, distribution and retailing systems will have an impact on their livelihoods too.

Street vendors are also the main points of sale for poor consumer who rarely purchase in supermarkets because of many reasons like higher prices, inconvenient location, poor quality etc. Poor also spend significantly higher portion of their income on food items. So changes to distribution and retail systems for food have a strong impact on poor as consumers too.

With these cross linkages in mind it is imperative that some business model and structure should emerge that links the poor farmers, poor retailers and poor consumer. In nutshell, a fruit and vegetable procurement, distribution and retailing system established and operated by the poor to serve the poor.

Lets be fair to the middlemen and the agents. Had it not been these much maligned folks, every nook and corner of India would have been deprived of their daily dose of Pan (Beetle leaves). Considering very high perishability and low value of this product, thanks to middlemen, this product safely reaches all corners of India and thousands of people in India get their employment and pleasure (daily quota of pan) still keeping the prices low for anyone to afford – that too without refrigerated transport. Can Reliance Fresh duplicate this effort? You bet..

This is not in defense of middlemen or an ode to them. This is reality and I know this better after spending 20 plus years in organized fresh produce retail in India with companies like Mother Dairy, Reliance Retail and Subhiksha with a brief to eliminate or at least reduce middlemen from food supply chain.

It is not incidental that all above said big fruit and vegetable retailers still by between 30-40% of fruit and vegetable supplies from these middlemen in wholesale market. Go and check their yesterday’s purchase records. History of Safal Market at Bangalore would have been different had it built itself on the strengths of existing middlemen.

A little known secret – Most of the times in a year, auction price of Potato from Agra (UP) at Azadpur Wholesale market is cheaper than the price at Agra itself even if the potato is arriving in this market from same belt. Same is true for Onions from Nasik. Well, it is wide inter-middlemen competition that drives down the price where as potato growers exploit the limited and thinnly spread traders at production source.