M3S2 – DUCK Persimmon Fruit

Author

ITC – Begoña Arenas

Mini Project ID

ITCMPFRUIT

Description

The Marketing director wants to propose a promotional campaign based on the key features and benefits of the fruit they want to start growing, persimmon. This is the starting point of the information they have and think it would be useful:

The yellow-orange persimmon fruit is an excellent source of fiber, Vitamin A (it contains carotene and cryptoxanthin, both with provitamin A activity, very interesting nutritionally) and a high level of vitamin C, vitamin B6, potassium and the mineral manganese. Persimmons are fat-free and are a good source of healthy carbohydrates and natural sugar. They have an antioxidant activity with beneficial effects, as they decrease the risk of certain degenerative diseases (cancer, cardiovascular, diabetes, cancer and neurological conditions like Alzheimer’s etc.)

Sector

General

Data

The marketing manager starts working on the idea and proposes to inform about persimmon using a story for users:

What is this fruit? It has the color of a peach, its skin is shiny like a nectarine, it is sweet like a mango and it is eaten more or less the same as an apple…. But What is it, really?

It is a Persimmon. If you haven’t heard of this new fruit, you are not alone. Although it is an old fruit, Persimmon has “exploded” in the last two years, and it is not only bought and eaten, but it is also talked about. The Persimmon is in fashion.

Where did it come from? Forget about the exotic fruits brought from the other side of the world, such as guava or papaya. The Persimmon is an invention. And in fact, it is a Spanish invention. But how do you invent a fruit?

Kakhi came from China to the Mediterranean basin in the seventeenth century, and for centuries it has evolved to give rise to the different local varieties that are grown today: as examples, the Italian type, the Israeli Triumph or the Bright Red in Spain.

In Spain, persimmon did not matter to almost anyone for centuries. It was cultivated in what is now Andalusia, the Valencian Community and Catalonia, on the margins of the meadows and always associated with small plantations without much economic interest. The reason is that those first persimmons were small, hard, not very tasty and their trees did not produce that many fruits….

At the beginning of the 20th century, the first commercial plantations began to be made in the Ribera Alta, in Valencia, and that is where the Rojo Brillante variety emerged. The farmers of the area favored this new variety, which at that time they christened the Red Fat persimmon: its size was much larger than the previous fruits, so it was much more worthwhile to dedicate efforts to get the harvest ahead.

But these new and plump fruits still had a problem, and that is that their sweet taste was accompanied by a scratchy trace on the tongue after eating it, astringency caused by the presence of tannins and it can be so strong that it makes it inedible or unappetizing to many people. Faced with this problem, the fruit itself has a solution: tannins are only present in the fruit when it is green and disappear as it ripens. So, you just had to wait long enough until the persimmons were ripe enough to remove the scratchy sensation!!.

In the 70s, Israeli scientists developed a post-harvest method to eliminate the astringency of the Sharon variety persimmons: after a visit to Israel, in the 90s Spanish scientists from Valencia tried a new way with local persimmons and they succeeded: the key was to gas it with ethanol. If persimmons are put in an ethanol chamber for the right amount of time (approximately 16 hours), the gas achieves the same effect from the outside: This is how persimmons were born. This “invention” has also given an economic interest that has made it grow and reach production, sale, and export figures that traditional persimmon, due to its softness, would never have been able to achieve.

What could be a good lead for this entry?

Model

Calculation

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