2020 - The year ahead

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2020 - The year ahead

A blog entry to share our plans for 2020.


Firstly we’d like to wish you all a Happy New Year and to extend our thanks to all our customers for their loyalty throughout 2019.


After a few weeks break at the start of this year, our farmers have now resumed harvesting and exporting fresh soursop fruit and leaves to us so you can now order as usual using the following link; https://soursopuk.com/shop.html


We hope 2020 will continue on from a great year's trading in 2019 during which we dispatched thousands of orders to customers in the UK and abroad.


Fresh soursop availability was as good as we could have hoped for in 2019, with weekly availability around 85% of the year.


We hope the fresh soursop fruit availability will be just as good this coming year.


Thanks to our extensive network of suppliers located in various parts of the globe we are well positioned to source the fresh fruit at most times. Our farmers harvest responsibly, and crucially do not over-harvest (by picking too many fruits at one time, including fruits which aren’t yet fully mature) which allows for steady supply most of the year.


The availability of fresh soursop leaves throughout 2019 was not as good as we hoped so we are looking to improve this in 2020. We are actively seeking new suppliers and have received some samples in the last few weeks. We will keep you posted regarding our progress.


We should remind you that in common with many other naturally grown fruit and vegetables, there are of course factors outside our control that can affect the availability of the fresh soursop fruit and leaves. The main factor is severe weather conditions, which can impact the growing cycle, harvesting times, and also the air transport. Customers tell us that they rely on us for their soursop needs and this drives us to ensure our customers benefit from us having access to supplies from a number of regions to counter problems in any particular region.


We’re excited to be making good progress with sourcing valuable new soursop products for which we have seen significant customer demand.


The key products we are hoping to add to our range this year include pure soursop juice, dried soursop fruit and soursop fruit powder.


Our owner and manager have recently returned from a productive trip to Southeast Asia during which they visited a large drinks manufacturer to taste some bespoke pure soursop juice samples which we had requested. They were very happy with the taste of the samples produced by the product development team. Our staff were also given a tour of the factory and learnt in more detail about the production process of the soursop juice - from harvest to bottle.


We now need to decide on the packaging type and whether the juice should be smooth or contain the natural fruit pulp. What's your opinion? Please do let us know.


Further negotiations will take place to finalise the details of our first order but we are glad to have found a supplier who we can rely on to produce a top quality pure soursop juice at a fair price.


We also plan to experiment with producing our own pure soursop juice in the spring of 2020. It will be produced from whole ripe soursop fruits here in the UK and priced at around £20 to £25 per litre. We need to look the best method of preservation which we expect will be freezing. The pure juice is also suitable for refrigeration but will have a limited shelf life of around 7 days. Would this product be of interest to you? Again, please let us know.


We are speaking with various other suppliers about dried soursop fruit and dried soursop fruit powder and hope to be able to provide an update in the coming weeks.


Whilst we’re on the topic of 2020, we’d like to provide advance notice of our next intended closure which will be in August or September for 2 weeks and more details will be provided nearer the time. It will be an opportunity for our staff to take a break and travel to Asia to continue to build supplier relationships. During this time it will not be possible to order fresh soursop fruit or leaves but all other products will be available as normal.


2020 is a crucial year for us. We expect to relocate to new premises which will be more efficient for order packing, have additional storage space and improved office facilities. We are increasing our workforce and making significant investment in new products.


We look forward to serving you throughout 2020 and thank you for your continued loyalty.


If there’s anything new you’d like to see us do in 2020, or you have suggestions on how we can improve our business, we’d love to hear! Please email us on info@soursopuk.com