In early September we hosted international buyers and overseas agriculture students from Northwest A&F University at our growing base on the northern slope of the Qinling Mountains. They walked the blocks at the start of picking, went through the grading line, and ate the fruit off the sorting table rather than out of a sample box.
Why we keep doing this
Most buyers investigating a new Chinese supplier work from photographs and a specification sheet, and photographs are easy to arrange. Walking the orchard is harder to fake. You see whether the trellis structure is maintained, whether fruit is thinned properly, whether fallen fruit is being picked up, and how the pickers handle the crop.
For us it is also useful pressure. Every block we opened to visitors had to be presentable without notice, which is the point.
What a visit covers
- Cooperative orchard blocks at the Qinling foothills, away from industrial zones
- Field pest control: pheromone traps, biological agents, reduced synthetic input
- Pre-cooling, automated grading by size, weight and Brix
- Controlled-atmosphere storage and the registered export packing house
- Documentation: lot codes, traceability records, export registration
Visits run best between September and November. Outside the harvest window there is less to see in the field, though the nursery and storage facilities stay open all year.
If you cannot travel
Plenty of buyers cannot justify a trip to Shaanxi for a trial container. In that case we do a live video walk-through of the blocks and the packing house at picking time, and we are happy to have any third-party inspector you nominate run a pre-shipment inspection. Ask for either through our contact page, or read more about how the base is managed on the about page.