“EU retailers need not just fruit, but supply predictability, product traceability and lower losses,” says David Saakyan, founder of BellyBella Fruit Company, an Armenian producer and exporter of flat peaches, flat nectarines and plums.
“Procurement approaches in the European peach and nectarine category are changing. In the past, the key arguments for professional buyers were origin, price, seasonality and the external appearance of the fruit. Today, other parameters are increasingly coming to the fore: supply stability, manageable shelf life, traceability, compliance with retail chain requirements, packaging, cold chain management and the supplier’s ability to reduce operational risks for retailers,” the exporter notes.
This shift is becoming increasingly visible across the stone fruit category, where product quality can change rapidly after harvest and weather risks directly affect volume, size, taste, uniformity and shelf life. Buyers are looking for suppliers capable of covering the season in a systematic way, meeting food safety requirements, working with private labels, ensuring batch uniformity and minimizing losses at store level, EastFruit reports.
The European Commission notes that EU fruit and vegetable production will face a number of challenges, including extreme weather events, rising energy costs, restrictions on pesticide use and pest outbreaks. At the same time, consumption of fresh produce is expected to grow as consumers show increasing interest in healthier diets. In practice, this creates a new situation for retailers: demand for fresh fruit remains strong, while the reliability of traditional supply sources is becoming less guaranteed.
Stone fruit is becoming a category of special importance for retailers
“Peaches, nectarines and plums belong to the type of products where a mistake in the supply chain quickly turns into losses. Insufficiently rapid cooling, inconsistent sorting, weak packaging, disruption of the temperature regime or lack of precise traceability can reduce shelf life, increase write-offs and worsen the consumer experience. For retail chains, this is both a quality issue and an economic issue for the category,” says David Saakyan.
According to the European Commission, more than 58 million tonnes of food waste are generated in the EU every year, with an estimated value of around €132 billion. Retail and distribution account for 8% of food waste, while primary production accounts for another 10%. For highly perishable fruit and vegetable products, this is a particularly sensitive issue: every additional day of shelf life and every more consistent batch have direct commercial value.
According to David Saakyan, founder of BellyBella Fruit Company, this is why modern buyers increasingly value not only the origin of the product, but also the supplier’s ability to manage the entire chain.
“For retailers, it is not enough to offer tasty fruit. They need a ready commercial product: clear in positioning, stable in quality, convenient for the shelf and predictable in supply. A consumer may buy a fruit for the first time out of curiosity, but repeat purchases appear only when quality is consistent,” Saakyan notes.
Traceability is becoming not an additional advantage, but the language of trust
One of the key requirements of the European market remains traceability. According to CBI, the Netherlands-based Centre for the Promotion of Imports from developing countries, which publishes practical requirements for exporters to the EU market, product traceability is a mandatory condition for working with the European market.
For suppliers, this means that quality claims must be supported by a system. This is especially important in a segment where retail chains work with large volumes, private labels and strict specifications.
At BellyBella Fruit Company, which is developing the production of flat peaches, flat nectarines and plums in Armenia, traceability has been built into the production model. According to Saakyan, each box is labelled in a way that allows the product to be traced back to a specific plot of the orchard.
“Our task is not simply to ship fruit, but to provide the client with a controlled batch. We can trace the product down to the row in the orchard. For us, this is a tool of control; for the buyer, it is a tool of trust,” he says.
The company controls the key stages of the chain: from the orchard and agronomic programme to cooling, sorting, packaging and shipment. To date, BellyBella has already planted 600 hectares of orchards. According to the company, production volume in 2026 is expected to reach around 6,000 tonnes, with plans to increase output to 27,000–28,000 tonnes by 2029–2030.
BellyBella is GlobalG.A.P. certified and is working on obtaining GRASP, FCA and IFS Food certification.
“From the beginning, we built our production not as a local orchard, but as an export platform. If you want to work with retail chains, you have to think not only about the fruit, but also about standards, documentation, packaging, traceability, the cold chain and repeatable quality,” David Saakyan emphasizes.
“We see our strategy not in one-off sales, but in long-term work with markets. Quality, technology and a systematic approach allow us to reach a wider range of buyers. But to do this, a supplier must be ready for retail requirements not formally, but across the entire chain,” concludes David Saakyan.
The use of the site materials is free if there is a direct and open for search engines hyperlink to a specific publication of the East-Fruit.com website.