Sultana and Raisin Market Report - 16/05/2024

Current Crop

This week the TMO agreed the sale of its remaining 2022 crop to packers, traders, and the alcohol industry. With pricing underneath current market levels the circa 8,000mt available wasn’t going to go particularly far in alleviating raw material availability issues. To emphasise exactly how much the market is short of current crop of the 8,000mt available the TMO received requests for circa 70,000mt, if this doesn’t show how short the current crop availability is then I don’t know what does.

I was given the opportunity to purchase some raw material from a trader at 112,000 Turkish Lira per mt ($3500 / £2750 equivalent). By time you consider processing cost/waste, cost of finance/pallets, and profit (yes that dirty word) is somewhere between $350-$450 per ton it makes for the most expensive export price in my time within the industry.

2024 Crop

Last week the Aegean Exporters Union announced a new crop figure of 250,000mt at the INC Congress (Nuts & Dried Fruits largest gathering of industry players) in Vancouver. This figure isn’t necessarily seen as 100% accurate as it’s still very early to have a definitive idea on new crop tonnage but it’s certainly indicative of some hope. That hope must be tempered somewhat given that theoretically there will be no/minimal carryover of 2023 crop and an export demand of circa 220,000mt plus domestic demand of 30,000mt. This means that they are predicting there will be just about enough material from 2024 crop.

The view in the vineyards is very much a mixed bag and again too early to really tell what is going to happen. On the surface there is not too much damage, currently no diseases, and on the main a positive outlook. However, consider the fact it’s only May and we’ve seen some storms damaging vineyards between June to early August over the last couple of years then there’s still some potential downfalls for this crop.

A local agricultural report performed early last week put bunch counts per vine at somewhere between 14 to 16 on average, this is down from 22 to 25 per vine last year. One chain of thought on this though is that tonnage produced could/should still be similar as the vines will be able to have the energy to produce larger physical berries this year. This may mean smaller sized fruit will command a premium throughout 2024 crop but again it’s early.

Summary

With the present availability, or lack of, there is not going to be any downward pressure on pricing anytime soon and I do NOT expect any price relief for new crop. The market is already scratching around for material now so stocks within Europe come August will be at critically low levels, there are reports of some defaults on contracts across Europe, some factories are already closed for 2 months to do refurbishment because they don’t have material, and present expectation is that we’re going to see a crop that isn’t large enough to significantly drag pricing downwards.

It paints somewhat of a bleak picture and one that really doesn’t have too many upsides in my opinion. These prices may be undesirable but I feel like they’re here to stay well into 2025.