Famed Texas Red Grapefruits Go Global
In partnership with: Texas Department of Agriculture
In a competitive marketplace, Texas agricultural products have made a global name for themselves, inviting the world to taste The Lone Star State’s delicacies. One of the more recent export triumphs is the open door for Texas red grapefruits in the Vietnamese market.
Fresh Market for Citrus
The Vietnam market hesitated to embrace Texas citrus products for years because its agricultural leaders had concerns about the possibility of invasive pests. The export market remained closed until the Texas Department of Agriculture (TDA) could prove its producers have appropriate shipping practices and sanitary measures to keep from exporting invasive pests along with their produce. However, in 2023, everything changed for the better.
“TDA has been wonderful about opening doors and helping to get export markets,” says Dale Murden, president of Texas Citrus Mutual, the growers’ organization for the state’s commercial citrus industry. “Dan Hunter (TDA’s assistant commissioner) and I were in South Korea several years ago. We’re trying to open any door available to us, and Vietnam came up first. We’re absolutely looking forward to a future movement of fruit.”
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Grapefruit Headed East
The country of Vietnam is known as Southeast Asia’s rising star. It’s also a coveted global marketplace.
“Vietnam is a very interesting market,” says Dante Galeazzi, president and CEO of Texas International Produce Association. “Consumers there want a very sweet piece of fruit. In Asian culture, sweet citrus is common, especially around events like the Lunar New Year. So, that consumer is so well educated on sweet citrus that it makes Texas grapefruit in the Vietnam marketplace an absolute win for us.”
After all, Texas’ red grapefruit is said to be the sweetest grapefruit in the world.
“The Texas A&M Citrus Center has been dedicated to developing a redder, sweeter grapefruit through crossbreeding,” Galeazzi says. “They put trees next to each other and bred, bred, bred until they got hot red. And the combination of trees, soil, and environment here helps to make the grapefruit especially sweet with a higher sugar content. You can eat it without adding sugar on top!”
Sharing Sweetness
Sharing that sweetness with the world opens up a new revenue stream for farmers. Because there’s significant overlap in the markets for grapefruit grown in Texas, California and Florida, an oversupply in the domestic marketplace can decrease prices and lower profit margins.
“We’re all looking to expand our markets so we’re not stepping on each other’s toes and driving prices down for good quality fruit,” Murden says.
A global marketplace changes the outlook.
“If we can market Texas grapefruit around the world, it increases opportunity for Texas farmers,” Galeazzi says. “That’s also profitability because the more volume we can get into other markets means the appropriate volume domestically. It keeps prices right where they need to be for everybody to be profitable and for consumers to still enjoy the grapefruit.”
Increased opportunity and profitability for Texas farmers have a multiplier effect.
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“It creates an opportunity for them to increase production and supply,” Galeazzi says. “Those increases result in additional increases – more workers, more jobs, more careers, more investment, more buildings, etc. That’s why international markets like Vietnam are so important to Texas agricultural goods.”
And Vietnam is just the beginning. “Once we reach more and more marketplaces, grapefruit really has a place at the table across the world,” Galeazzi says. “I hope this is the catalyst to additional market penetration and market introductions throughout the Asian marketplace.”
The excitement is contagious across markets partly because it’s a matter of Texas pride.
“GO TEXAN. Go Texas grapefruit,” Murden says. “It’s nice to have the market open. We’re proud of what we do.”