Project title: Sustainable shipment of Mexican mangoes for European consumers
Project number: SMP-19068
Requesting country: Mexico
Year: 2019
Budget: € 40,000
Project leader: Rene Oostewechel
Knowledge institute: Wageningen University & Research
Project partners: Total produce, Bakker Barendrecht, HillFresh International, Special Fruit, Port International, EMEX, ITESO Universidad Jesuita de Guadalajara

Summary
EMEX, a non-profit civil association, brings together mango packaging in Mexico for the export of mango to international markets, mainly to the United States. EMEX supports packers and producers of mango in relation to research, phytosanitary control, post-harvest treatment, packaging, marketing, and in general the actions that tend to take care of the interests of this industry.

Over 30 packing operations are united in EMEX and each packing operation processes between 5000 and 20.000 tons of fruit each season. Fruit are provided by several hundreds of farmers that perform their orchard management and harvesting in compliance with the specifications of the respective packing operation. Currently, major part of the production is exported to USA by truck. EMEX urgently wants to broaden its market to European countries. To increase export volumes to Europe it is necessary to develop protocols that allow Mexican mangos to be shipped in reefer containers. In addition, from a sustainability point of view, sea shipments are highly preferred above airplanes (10-50 times less CO2 footprint). Earlier attempts of reefer shipments to e.g. Special Fruit and Port International showed that pesticide residues were major problem and that the product quality at arrival was insufficient for the European market.

In this project several companies team up with experienced Wageningen and Mexican scientists to investigate the bottlenecks in the Mexican to Europe mango chain and to investigate and validate a number of novel (sustainable) interventions to improve product quality. The project will establish new business or indicate the future business opportunities for Dutch and other European importers of mangos from Mexico.

Presentation