Industry insiders said that Thailand's pineapple production experience summer weather disaster, winter crops are not optimistic.

 

A Thai insider said, "Summer crops have been proven to have experienced a disaster, especially as predicted earlier this year. As a result, the delivery time has been much delayed than planned, and many factories are fully booked by the end of this year. An American importer commented that his order had been postponed from late summer to February 2017.

 

Summer crops are destroyed by high temperature and low rainfall, which may affect winter crops.

 

Although there is no official data, crops do not seem to have reached the expected 700,000 tons this summer. Usually winter crop yields account for 56-60% of total pineapple production in Thailand. Thai manufacturers expect winter crop production to start in September to be about 1 million tons.

 

"Due to backlog of orders, factories will actively purchase raw materials at the beginning of the production season," the industry added.

 

Because of the severe pineapple shortage, farmers have started harvesting immature pineapples in order to profit from the high price of raw materials, which means that factories will resume production slowly and may waste raw materials, the contact said.

 

Raw material prices are still far higher than expected at 13.50-14 baht/kg (equivalent to $0.38-0.39/kg).

 

"Winter crops are not expected to be optimistic and there will be no turnaround," he concluded, adding that "there will still be tight supply and high prices, but how much higher than past summer crops remains to be determined, and only hope that it will be better."