Information for fruit and vegetables business in CIS
Turkish tomato on Kyiv markets is said to be of Crimean origin
As the Agricultural Marketing Project was informed, on Kyiv markets tomato, imported from Turkey is sold as Ukrainian commodity. Vendors just take off stems and reload tomatoes from their "native" boxes. Usually you can hear from the vendors that these tomatoes are supplied from Crimea.
As known, many Ukrainians prefer to purchase nationally produced vegetables. People find them ecologically safe, useful for health and tasty. However, Ukrainian tomato is often of unstable quality that means different shape, size and color of tomato in one set of commodity. Besides, usually Ukrainian tomatoes are supplied in worse quality packing than their imported competitors.
Ukraine imports tomatoes mainly from Turkey which differ from the locally produced commodities by the quality packing - it preserves the tomatoes in excellent state, by the same uniform color, equal shape and size of all tomatoes in the set. In major cases the differential characteristic of Turkish tomato is the stem presence left after the harvesting; so that imported commodity could be easily identified. The main thing is that the specialists prove - it is groundless to say that the Ukrainian greenhouse tomatoes are more ecologically safe. There are also opinions that Turkish tomato is tastier than the locally produced.
As A. Yarovoy, the Price Monitoring Specialist of Agricultural Marketing Project, says, the situation of selling Turkish tomato as Ukrainian is rather widespread. The wholesale price of Turkish tomato can easily compete with the prices on locally produced commodities. Some vendors are trying to earn more money by uniting the perfect appearance of the imported tomato with the consumer's favor to the national produce.