An empirical analysis of the purchases of soft fruit in Scotland

The production of soft fruits in Scotland, the main fruit category produced in the country, has a marked seasonality. In addition, the availability of soft fruit depends on imports from the rest of the UK and abroad (i.e., EU and non-EU countries) during the entire year. The purpose of this paper is to update the evidence of a previous analysis (Revoredo-Giha et al., 2011) regarding the purchases of soft fruit in Scotland. There are three main motivations on the topic: (1) the Scottish Government interest about the country’s dependence on fruit from elsewhere; (2) whether the expansion of the domestic supply of soft fruit may increase the quantity demand for it, and therefore, getting consumers closer to the health-related recommendations and (3) to what extent consumers’ purchases of soft fruit follow locality and seasonal patterns. For the empirical work we used time series constructed from the Kantar Worldpanel dataset for the period 2013 to 2021. Besides a descriptive analysis where we consider the origin of soft fruit purchased in Scotland, we pursued two further analyses: one was a seasonality analysis, and another was an estimation of an incomplete demand system by socioeconomic groups augmented by seasonal and trend terms. The results indicated that the share of Scottish soft fruit as a proportion of the total purchases is still modest and the purchases of soft fruit are still highly seasonal despite the possibility of getting out-of-season imported soft fruit; however, some of them show an increasing trend. Although strawberries, the main produced soft fruit from Scotland, are price sensitive and inelastic, raspberries price elasticities are above one showing more reaction to prices and possibilities to increase consumption if prices decrease.