BEIJING: Guo Mingjuan has been in the cherry business since 2013, a time when imported cherries started gaining Chinese consumer favor. Starting out, her business was based in China, but in 2019 a friend asked her to jointly establish their own company in Chile. And so they did.
Their new undertaking proved a second bite of the cherry for Guo. The fruit’s red hue makes it a “lucky charm” in Chinese culture, and it brought her much happiness in her new home.
Apart from being lucky in love and meeting her Mr. Right, Guo’s cherry business thrived. Today, the company exports an average of 60 twenty-foot equivalent units of containers (about 19 tons per container) of cherries each year. According to the latest statistics from the Chilean Fruit Exporters Association, 88 percent of Chilean cherries were exported to China during the 2021-22 production period.
In recent years, exotic products from Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC), like Chilean cherries, Peruvian blueberries and Uruguayan dairy products, have become new favorites in Chinese shopping carts.
–The Daily Mail-Beijing Review news exchange item
