It takes fire to refine gold, but what happens when you throw some onions into the mix?

Our UK team turned the challenge of late data on onion varieties into an innovative solution, enabling them to secure a significant market share in the onion industry. Discover what John Desoyza, our Market Development Manager, has to share about this successful “transformation” project.

“Good things can come from the pressure we face, and we faced quite a lot of it. Twelve years ago, frustration started to appear in our team. We did not know where we stood with our onions in the UK. We were producing results and advancement recommendations for the next generation of onion varieties in May and June, which was too late. Just like our trial data with the final judgements that were arriving too late to the colleagues. Even if we worked hard, our selections got dismissed.

We put our heads together and asked ourselves: what could we do? If there was a way to cause the onions to deteriorate more rapidly, we could get the storage result sooner, and that would mean that the result would have to be commercially relevant. So, we started to run a series of experiments to determine what the optimal conditions to achieve this goal were. We varied the variables of temperature, light, and later, relative humidity.

From these experiments, the Accelerated Onion Deterioration Store was born and subsequently refined. Today, we screen all our trial onions with this system, giving us thorough and commercially relevant storage results as early as early February or even sooner. We are now able to produce the data we need months before it would be expected and to look at key attributes of sprouting, rots, root re-growth and base plate movement. This work allowed us to identify Fasto, our most famous onion in the UK, and to confirm the performance of other key hybrids, such as Nico, Rondo, Redrover and Reflash.

Innovation driven by adversity and the invested expertise of our colleagues led to this breakthrough. Today, for the main yellow onion spring drilled segment, we have around a 30 % market share and good prospects to further penetrate this and the red onion market.”

Would you like to learn more about this project or our onion varieties? Do not hesitate to contact us.