Smart Choice
The international market
The product was trialled in New Zealand supermarkets in 2003 and then again in a number of American stores a year later. "Everyone knows what colour bananas they like and ripeSense gives customers the same knowledge for other fruit."
In 2004, exposure in TIME magazine threw ripeSense into the international scene while it was still at the commercialisation stage. "In 2004 we were still test marketing, making sure we could manufacture, get the consistency we wanted, developing our systems and processes to support our customers around the world," says Mr McInness.
"We had this whole plan that we would slowly start in the markets and be quite careful about how we went ahead. Then we rolled up in TIME and the phone and emails just didn't stop." The product now has a strong market in the United States and the United Kingdom, and is also available in Germany, Switzerland and parts of France, but it has not yet been seen on supermarkets shelves in New Zealand. Apparently, ripeSense has found New Zealand a very hard market to crack.
"One of the biggest challenges for us in this market is that we're dealing with a packaged product," says Mr McInness. "If you look around our supermarkets we're not a heavily packaged market, as you see in Europe."
