How much the middlemen take

Every season the same news story appears: citrus multiplies several times over between the field and
the shelf. It’s true and it’s measured — farmers’ organisations regularly publish
farm-gate and retail price indices that track it season after season.

What almost never gets explained, either in the story or in the discussion that follows, is
where exactly that difference goes. And it’s worth doing, because the answer isn’t
«somebody pockets it»: it’s that there are many hands along the way, each with its own structure to
pay for, and almost all with perfectly real costs.

The links in an orange’s chain

Seven steps, seven structures to support. Even if each takes a reasonable margin, multiplied by seven
the result is what it is: nobody has to be profiteering for the final price to end up a long way from
what was paid in the field. It’s arithmetic, not bad faith.

The three costs nobody sees

There are three items inside that chain that explain much of the difference and almost never come up
in the conversation.

Wastage

The fruit lost along the way: discarded at grading for size or a surface mark, spoiled in the cold
store, unsold in time in the shop. Somebody grew, picked and transported all of it, and its cost ends up
inside the price of what does sell.

How much perfectly good fruit is left out for not fitting a tray is in
why untreated fruit doesn’t all look alike.

The cold

Keeping a chamber at constant temperature and humidity for months costs energy every day. And that
fruit is also tied up: somebody has paid for it and hasn’t been paid for it yet.

Time

The least visible cost. Months can pass between a grower spending on a field and being paid for that
crop, and in many cases the final price is set when the fruit is already picked.

Why the grower is the weak link

It isn’t a matter of sympathies, it’s structural.

• They sell something perishable. An orange on the tree has a deadline: you can’t
  wait six months for the price to improve.
• They don’t set the price. In most cases they take it rather than negotiate it.
• They carry the weather risk. A frost, a hailstorm or a wet spring are theirs.
• And their costs come first. Water, diesel and wages are paid at the start of the
  season, long before anyone knows what it will sell for.

The result is familiar: seasons in which the farm-gate price doesn’t cover the cost of picking, and
fruit left on the tree because harvesting it costs more than it’s paid for.

And yet the chain makes sense

Worth saying, because the opposite argument is too easy.

Middlemen exist because they solve a real problem: a supermarket needs the same product, with the
same appearance and in the same quantity, every week of the year, and no individual grower can guarantee
that. Somebody has to aggregate, sort, store and distribute.

The problem isn’t that the chain exists. It’s that when it gets too long, the final price
stops bearing any relation to the work in the field, and the one with the thinnest margin is
the only one who can’t pass their costs on.

What changes when you sell direct

Taking links out doesn’t make costs disappear: it redistributes them. Selling direct costs money too,
and it’s worth being honest about where.

Preparing a hundred boxes for a hundred addresses costs more per kilo than loading a pallet. What you
gain isn’t so much an unbeatable price as a different relationship between what you pay and what
you get: fewer days since cutting, no treatments and the real season in front of you. It’s set
out in why buy fruit directly from the
grower.

The particular case of Valencian citrus

The general structure holds for any farm product, but with oranges here there are four particularities
that make it worse.

Many small holdings

Valencian citrus growing is very fragmented: thousands of owners with small plots, many inherited and
worked part-time. Against a buying centre negotiating by volume, that fragmentation leaves little power
to set prices.

A concentrated season

Eight months sounds like a lot, but within each variety the window is weeks. When the whole district
has the same variety ready at once, supply spikes and the farm-gate price falls.

Competition from imports

Fruit from other hemispheres arrives exactly when there’s none here, and that’s fine; the problem
appears when it overlaps the start of the local season. It’s set out in
why there are no oranges in August.

And costs that don’t fall

Irrigation water, diesel, picking wages and packaging rise with general inflation, while the farm-gate
price depends on a negotiation the grower almost never leads. When those two lines cross, fruit doesn’t
get picked.

What you can do

Without turning shopping into activism:

• Buy in season. That’s when the chain is shortest and the local grower competes on
  better terms. The calendar is in
  what there is each month.
• Look at the origin. It’s compulsory and it says more than any sign.
• Accept uneven fruit. A good share of the waste comes from demanding that every
  piece be identical.
• And buy direct when you can. Farmers’ markets, co-ops or the grower’s own online
  shop.

A note on the word «middleman»

The title of this article uses a word that has become an insult, and it shouldn’t be. The chain
contains everything: co-ops owned by the growers themselves that return the margin to them, family
packhouses three generations old, and large operators negotiating with a strength no producer has.

Lumping them all together helps nobody understand anything. What can be said is duller and more
useful: every link adds cost, and the more there are, the less the final price relates to what
was paid in the field.

So the answer isn’t to point fingers, but to shorten the route where you can. Sometimes that’s a
farmers’ market, sometimes a co-op and sometimes a shop like this one.

Where our box comes from

From our own fields in Albalat de la Ribera, in the Ribera del Xúquer. The fruit is picked after the
order comes in and leaves for your home within 24 or 48 hours, without going through a packhouse, a
grader or a cold store. Who’s behind it is in About us, and how we work, in
From tree to table.

What’s available this week is in the shop.