Nick Erker: Hey, there. Welcome to Get the Scoop with Smirks Podcast, where bulk ingredient conversation happens. We’re sharing our knowledge and expertise as bulk ingredient importers, tapping into the latest trends we are seeing and commenting on what that means for natural food businesses as they approach ingredient purchasing, product development, and marketing. You’ll hear the latest market reports, ingredient specifications, and product applications from Smirk’s in-house experts, as well as origin stories from our growers and processors around the world. Listen in for the scoop on what’s happening with bulk ingredients.
Nick Erker: Welcome to Get the Scoop with Smirks podcast. I’m Nick Erker, and today with me is Donny Edson. In honor of National Coconut Day, which takes place on June 26, we’re going to talk in-depth about coconut. First off, we’d like to thank our friends at the Coconut Coalition of the Americas for making the National Coconut Day possible, which started back in 2019. Coconuts are an incredibly versatile and diverse crop and definitely are something that should be celebrated. First, we’d like to talk in general about the origins of coconut and what its many uses are in the sustainability of the coconut industry. There are so many different coconut products we could talk about, but today we’d like to focus on the origins of coconut and some of the major product categories, desiccated coconut, oil cream, and some of the other derivatives. We’ll explore how desiccated coconut is produced, and in our product feature, we’ll talk about its uses and innovation with desiccated coconut.
Donny Edson: Let’s start with what is a coconut. That’s a great question, and it could be a little confusing because the nut is in the name. Actually, a coconut is not a nut, but rather a droop, so that means it’s botanically classified as a fruit. Interestingly enough, coconuts are more closely related to stone fruits such as peaches, plums, and cherries. The origin of coconut in the main growing regions is in Asia. Smirks has suppliers from four different countries the Philippines, Sri Lanka, Vietnam, and Indonesia. The coconut industry is huge, employing millions of people globally. In 2021, the global coconut products market was nearly $4.1 billion. By 2027, it could reach $7.184 billion. Consider the Tree of Life for good reason, there’s a long list of uses for coconut and parts of the coconut tree.
Nick Erker: Great point, Donny. Since the coconut market is so massive, there’s tremendous demand. It is fortunate that, generally speaking, coconuts are fairly sustainable. All parts of the coconut tree can be used. One coconut tree can produce up to 180 coconuts a year. For coconut growers, the appeal of coconut is that they can sell various parts of their harvest to different industries. Here’s a breakdown of what some of those many uses are for coconut. Coconut timber and shells. They’re used to manufacture various building materials such as pillars, doors, window frames, wood paneling, ceiling joists and much more. Coconut husks and the outer shell. Some facilities use the husks to create biofuel to run their facilities. It can also be a mosquito repellent and it is used in potting plants and even making mattresses and doormats. The shell can be used to create bowls, baskets, and also activated charcoal that is used in the cosmetic industry and can be derived from the shell.
Donny Edson: But that’s not all, Nick, there’s a lot more. Coconut leaves can be made into furniture, baskets, mats, and other household items. Coconut water inside the coconut is a valued beverage for its electrolytes and is used in sports drinks, juices, and more. Coconut milk is taken from the grated coconut pulp. It’s used for many different applications, including nondairy coffee creamer and other beverages, soups, and more. The coconut meat is processed to produce copra, virgin coconut oil, desiccated coconut, coconut butter, coconut flour, and coconut cream. The coconut saps turn into coconut sugar and coconut nectar. They’re produced from the sap of the flower buds from the coconut tree. Coconut aminos are made from fermented sap, and so is vinegar.
Nick Erker: To elaborate on the sustainability of the coconut industry, Smirks is involved in discussions about sustainability through our membership in the Coconut Coalition of the Americas. Some of the goals that the membership of the Coconut Coalition of Americas works towards are committing to protecting the environment, sustainability in the supply chain, guarding against food fraud and adulteration, nurturing farmers and their communities, ensuring sustainable production and consumption patterns, protecting and promoting ecosystems while we combat desertification and also halt and reverse land degradation and reduce inequality within and among these countries that produce coconuts. We look forward to continuing our work on these important goals with the Coconut Coalition of the Americas.
Donny Edson: We’ve touched on desiccated coconut and that’s what we’d like to highlight today. Nick and I always been intrigued by coconut. Actually, in 2010, we were taken by the Colorado Department of Agriculture to the Philippines to sell sunflower seeds and millet. And when we were there, we got to meet with some different coconut people. And so, we’ve always had this little desire to work with coconut. It’s one of the very first ingredients we started importing. We imported our first container from the Philippines in 2011. And I remember thinking, how are we going to sell all this coconut? We worked our way right through it and we went to buy another container and another container and another container, and it’s grown from there. Mother Nature has thrown us through some loops over the years, particularly when typhoons hit the Philippines. That was the first time we really had our first taste of what you do when the Philippines get hit by a typhoon and there’s nowhere to buy coconut. That’s what led us into setting up our supply chain in Sri Lanka as well. We really had no choice. There was no coconut the year we did it. And so that’s why we diversified our supply chain into Sri Lanka and we learned how valuable it was to have two supply chains. The seasons are different. The weather patterns are different. The currencies are different. Some customers prefer one origin over another origin as well. I think it’s important to talk about the Philippines, there are several areas where coconut’s grown as well. In the Philippines, with just south of Manila and the Luzon region being the Coconut Triangle area. But also when you go several hundred miles south to another island of Davao, there are several manufacturers that are based there, too. Even through the years, we’ve seen instances where maybe one area is hit with the drought and the other area is flourishing, so the price is completely different even though they’re in the same origin. As we got further along, we realized the importance of having even more origins set up, too, because there are cases where both the Philippines and Sri Lanka can be affected by something, and that’s when we onboard Vietnam and Indonesia. So today we do import from four different countries, and that actually was very valuable for us during the pandemic, when maybe one country got locked down for six or seven weeks or was on restrictions for how many people could be on a shift. We were able to juggle our positions around the globe and be able to keep coconut in stock for our customers as well.
Nick Erker: So that’s the importance of having multiple supply chains. And we encourage our customers to onboard suppliers from multiple countries to help eliminate these disruptions in their supply. Outside of the pandemic, this is still relevant with typhoons, as they have historically been known to damage a coconut crop in the Philippines. And different origins can have different freight prices that will affect your overall price.
Donny Edson: All right, Nick, now let’s talk about how desiccated coconut is made. In the end, it’s the same result, but there’s different ways that it starts out. In our travels around the world, we’ve seen a number of different ways the factories get their coconuts. When you go to Vietnam, one of the factories actually has a giant river right next to it, and barges full of coconuts pull up on the river, and they’re unloaded right into the factory. In the Philippines, my favorite is to watch the Jeepneys. The old vehicles that come in, they’re packed full of coconuts. They’re lined up forever, and they’re dropping off the coconuts into the factory there. Regardless of how it’s done, it all starts out with the husks removed from the coconut. The coconut shows up to the factory as a shell, just a coconut inside of a shell. The next step you have to do is get that shell off. The traditional method that they used to do was with a hatchet. They would take a hatchet, and they would hit until the shell came off. There are more modern techniques now that have automated machines that you can hold the coconut up against, and it’ll peel the shell off of the coconut. After you’ve taken the shell off, you’re left with a coconut that’s brown and it’s still full of water. So usually, they’ll crack it and take the water out from the inside and send that over to the water factories. There’s so much demand for coconut water now. Then they have to take this paper-thin membrane, what we call the coconut pairing, off of the coconut. And they do that with a vegetable peeler. So they peel it off and then they are left with the white coconut meat. The white coconut meat immediately goes into a bath of water, and it heads into the factory. First thing you have to do with that is sterilize it and soften it up. And that’s done by steaming it or putting it in boiling water for a period of time. It’s also really important that the coconut does go through that because once the coconut is introduced to air the microbiologicals, it can go crazy. So, you want it to go right into the hot water bath to start killing off the microbiologicals and to soften the coconut up. After it goes through this process, it goes through the desiccation process, which is essentially cutting the coconut into whatever shape you want it to be. And the desiccation can be anything as small as smaller than a grain of rice up to a big coconut chip. It’s the same machine. They just change the setting on it. After the coconut is desiccated, it goes right into the drying oven. And these ovens are gigantic. You see 50 yards long and it’s just a slow-moving belt at a high temperature. What it’s doing is taking the coconut and cooking it down to the right moisture level, killing off the microbiologicals, and stabilizing the fat inside of it, so the coconut lasts a long time. If they’re going to toast the coconut, they’re actually going to take the coconut off the drying oven and they’re going to rerun it through the oven a second time. The second time it’s just the right amount of time to be able to make it. So, you get a toasted coconut. After the coconut comes off there, it goes right into the final quality checks and then it gets bagged off, gets put into a holding area where they do all the testing for the micro biologicals as well as the physical pieces of it that we want to make sure the coconut’s good. Then once it’s released from that, it ships to us in the US so we can distribute it to our customers.
Nick Erker: At Smirks, we always strive to enhance our customer and vendor experiences and we’re always here to answer any questions that you might have. So please reach out to us about any questions you have concerning coconut or a multitude of other products that we supply. We’d love to hear from you and help you however we can. As with every Get the Scoop with Smirks episode, we do a product feature and today we’re doing our deep dive into coconut products. We discussed a lot about desiccated coconut, but there are many other products that come from the coconut itself. And from desiccated coconut, you can make it into oil, cream, milk, and many other things. So, Donny, tell us a little bit more about those products and how we work with them.
Coconut Product Feature
Nick Erker: As with every Get the Scoop with Smirks episode, we do a product feature and today we’re doing our deep dive into coconut products. We discussed a lot about desiccated coconut, but there are many other products that come from the coconut itself. And from desiccated coconut, you can make it into oil, cream, milk, and many other things. So, Donny, tell us a little bit more about those products and how we work with those.
Donny Edson: Yeah. Thanks, Nick. And I think one of the interesting things as we’re preparing for this podcast, I was thinking about is the trends with coconut. We’ve seen them happen every few years where one takes off and then it kind of declines and you think, well, that wasn’t short-lived. But then it comes back again, and it declines and it comes back again. And I feel like we’re in another trend area with coconut right now. And there’s a lot of innovation that’s happening with it right now. Whether with desiccated, oil, cream, flour, all the different items, it keeps getting reintroduced into the ingredient deck for people and innovation keeps happening. So, it is kind of exciting it’s not a one-and-done. Every couple of years, something new comes out with it. And we’ll talk about that a little bit here. But let’s start with desiccated coconut.
Desiccated coconut is widely available in both organic and conventional from several origins. As we’ve mentioned before, the Philippines, they’re like the originals for doing the coconut. The big factories in the Philippines. Sri Lanka forever has been doing coconut. There are factories there that have had 100-year anniversaries. Indonesia and Vietnam. So specifically, when we talk about desiccated coconut, there are a few different cuts.
The main one that Smirks focuses on is macaroon coconut. That’s the smallest cut of coconut. That’s the finest coconut that we get. We see people use that to cover a date when they want a coconut-covered date. We see that going into cookies, we see it going into coconut macaroons. So anytime you just want that coconut flavor and it’s a really small piece of coconut.
Medium coconut is by far the most popular coconut that we see. And medium coconut is used in cookies, it’s used in baking applications, it’s even used in pet treats. And with medium coconut, there are special order things that we even do for customers. We can do it toasted; we can do it toasted sweetened. We can do it toasted and sweetened with salt. We can do it sweetened untoasted. It’s really endless how you can do it. We can also do fair trade coconut for any of these cuts that we’re talking about as well.
The next one’s, coconut chips and they’re that it’s a chip. It’s a bigger piece, it’s a wider piece, it’s a longer piece. Coconut chips are really popular for granolas, bars, and anything where you want a little body to the coconut so you can actually see it inside of there. So, I think the biggest use that we see it going to right now one of the biggest trends is the grain-free granola space. It’s inexpensive, it’s got a lot of surface area, so you can get a lot of flavors on it. So that’s a really nice one.
And then the last one is a coconut smile. If you heard on our last podcast about how the desiccated coconuts are made when they peel off the coconut pairing after they’ve taken the shell off. Coconut smile is actually a big chip that still has the coconut pairing on it. Primarily coconut smiles come from Sri Lanka, and that’s because the coconuts in Sri Lanka, grow longer on the tree. They have thicker meat inside of them than they do, say, in the Philippines. So, you’ll find the biggest chips generally from Sri Lanka. And so that’s what makes the best coconut smile. Coconut smile is a really big piece of coconut that’s a chip, and it still has the brown skin on the outside of it. And we’re seeing more and more people start to use this again because it really holds up well with its size, but because it’s a little bit thicker it doesn’t break apart. But you can do anything with it. It’s really a blank canvas. You can put spices on it, you can do sweetened flavors on it, you can add different ingredients to it. It can be a standalone item for snacking. So that’s the coconut smile and again, that’s one that’s starting to take off. We even have people who enrobe it in chocolate as well. So, you have this big piece of coconut that’s covered in chocolate as well. But overall, there’s a wide range of applications when you talk about coconut.
So, the bakery applications do include cakes, macaroons, cookies, chocolates and confections, and cereals. As we mentioned, grain-free granola, grain grain-free cereals are really a popular thing right now. You get the same appearance texture and flavor as you would a granola, but there’s actually no grain inside of it. And that’s because they’re using seeds and coconut inside of it. So, cereals and granola. The snacking applications of coconut chips and coconut smiles are used as a standalone snack. They can be added to trail mixes. They can be incorporated into energy bars or bites of chocolate. So again, you can enrobe this stuff in chocolate. We have some customers that actually add a toasted coconut onto a nut and then robe that in chocolate. So you have like, layers of flavor along the way. Savory dishes, so they can be incorporated into stir-fries, soups, smoothies, sprinkled on salads, and used in some of the Thai and Indian dishes. And then one of the more evolving ones we’ve been seeing lately is actually pet treats, believe it or not. So, we generally find that the consumer will spend more on their pets than they will on themselves. So, the animals are eating healthy right now. So, coconut is really healthy for dogs. Coconut smiles are something some people maybe even flavor, like bacon, and then they’ll feed them to their dogs. But we’re also seeing a lot of desiccated coconut going into chews for dogs and dog treats as well. And they’re using an incredible amount of coconut.
Some of the innovation that we’re seeing traditionally coconut, has always been about baking and on the baking side, but we’re seeing a lot of other applications. So, we’ve already talked about some of the snacking innovations. We mentioned a little bit about how you can coat a nut with it. But we are starting to see more stuff in the marketplace with coconut-coated nuts like cashews and almonds. Adding coconut to dark chocolate, it’s being used to create a candy that’s lower in sugar, but it still feels like a decadent snack. Adding coconut into fruit balls. We’re seeing this more with, as we mentioned, pet treats, but also as you get more of these snacks that you can just grab one off and chew, that might be a pulverized fruit with coconut added in it, maybe some nuts, things like that.
One that’s really taken off in the last few years is coconut clusters or bites. And that’s where they take a desiccated coconut and generally some kind of a sticky sweetener. It could be maple syrup. It could be brown rice syrup. And they’re adding in seeds. It could be pumpkin seeds, sunflowers, chia, pecans, or anything like that. And they’re making a bite. It’s a square that you can pick up, and you could take a couple of bites of it. And so that’s been a really popular trend. We’ve seen it stick around for quite a while right now. I don’t know if it’s a trend. It’s a mainstay item right now.
Some of the other items that do derive from coconut, are coconut cream, and coconut milk. This is where we see a lot of growth happening right now and a lot of innovation. So, at the last natural food show, we were trying a number of different coconut ice creams and coconut yogurts. Coconut cream makes really good yogurt. It’s really smooth. You can actually make some that has the same texture as Greek yogurt. You can have a runnier yogurt. Coconut cream and coconut milk are going into a lot of ice creams and yogurts right now.
Coconut oil is being used with cashews to make plant-based cheeses. So, they’re able to replicate what is actually inside of a cheese with plants. And they need the fat. The fat is coming from the coconut oil. So a lot of the plant-based cheeses, if you look at them right now, are made with coconut oil and cashews as well. And some of the other things we’re seeing even is coconut cream being mixed with coconut sugar and cooked into a caramel that you can eat as a sweet treat in the caramel. So we’re seeing more of these caramels come out that are just made with coconut sugar and coconut cream as well.
One of the areas that surprised us as a company I think is the cosmetic industry. We had never really paid attention to it and we started to get customers that called and asked us for it. We’re really amazed at the amount of coconut oil that goes into the cosmetic industry. So, we have a lot of customers that are calling and starting to use coconut oil inside the cosmetic business.
And the last one we’ve really seen enormous growth with is coconut milk powder. Powder is being used in items such as oatmeal cup, dried oats, other ingredients, and coconut milk powder. When you pour the hot water into it, it becomes really creamy, has that nice texture, but it’s still all plant-based. It’s being used as a coffee creamer for the dried coffee creamer market. You could take the coconut milk powder, you can add a sweetener to it, you can add a flavor like vanilla or matcha and you simply put a couple of spoons into your coffee in the morning and stir it in. You get again the creaminess and the flavor. It’s still plant-based, but you also get that really cool mouthfeel that it puts into your coffee. We’re also seeing coconut milk powder be used a lot in the dried shake or protein drink mixes. Again, add that creamy texture like you get from milk while being able to keep the product plant-based. So, as you can see, we really love coconut here at Smirks and we hope you love coconut too. We just really want to remind everybody to help celebrate National Coconut Day on June 26. We want to say thank you to all of our customers that have been doing the innovation and creating things with coconut. We want to say thank you to all of our suppliers around the world who have been supporting all the growth in the United States and helping with innovation as well. Again, we want to celebrate coconut on June 26 and we really want to give a thank you to the Coalition of America. This was really a grassroots effort from everybody in the industry and everybody’s buying into it globally right now to help drive coconut and do things in a good way.
Smirk’s June 2023 Monthly Market Report
Donny Edson: Here is to get the scoop of Smirks market report for June 2023. To start off, I’m going to talk a little bit about ocean freight and ports. Right now I would call it pretty smooth sailing. Currently, we are not seeing any major disruptions with any of the ports or ocean freight that is out of the norm. We have been monitoring contract negotiations with the port workers on the West Coast as there was a little slowdown a few days ago in Seattle. Ocean freight continues to soften from Europe and South America and we still see some downside from these regions as they have not hit the pre-COVID levels yet like the rest of the lanes we buy from.
In addition to logistics, I think it’s worth mentioning we are seeing some relief in the last pieces of the supply chain that caused bottlenecks during COVID, that being the warehouses. As importers have been working through older stocks and running more of the just-in-time model, warehouses have been able to catch up and we’re seeing better service than we saw a year ago. We also feel that for the first time in a while, it would not be difficult to find extra space in the country. However, the damage has been done in regard to warehouse costs, and we’ve seen close to 100% price increases in some warehouse charges compared to 2019. With the higher cost to borrow money and the increase in warehouse costs, more importers are running with just-in-time inventory. As an importer, we use about twelve weeks from ordering from origin to have the product arrive in our warehouses. In some cases, we can get the product in sooner, but a good rule of thumb is to allow twelve weeks to be safe. This means there will be less spot products available in the USA for customers to buy on short notice as people continue to buy just what they need or a little bit more than what they have sold. Planning out your needs is highly recommended.
Currently, it really feels like a buyer’s market on most item. There’s a couple of items that are firming up, but overall most items are pretty soft. Beginning with almonds, the crop estimate came out and it was much better than people had anticipated with what had happened with the weather there in the winter months. So, with the decent crop coming out and the large carryover, the market has softened again and it’s a buyer’s market.
Cashews continue to remain pretty soft with no upward movement. Sunflower seeds continue to drop in price from Bulgaria and the US. packers are also lowering their prices to try to keep up. Overall, we’re just not seeing a lot of demand in the sunflower space right now.
Coconut’s kind of all over the board. We’ve seen increases in virgin coconut oil from several origins. Although RBD oil does stay stable. The desiccated prices from Sri Lanka and Vietnam have gone up considerably, with Vietnam being very, very high. However, prices from the Philippines and Indonesia continue to be very good prices at the moment. One area of concern is coconut sugar. The Ramadan slowdown this year, coupled with increases of rain in Indonesia have made the trees not produce sap that turns into sugar quite as well. So all the packers are trying to catch up on coconut sugar and the supply is drying up in the country. I would anticipate that sugar inventories in the US are going to be very, very tight through August. Coconut milk and coconut cream prices are very stable in the Philippines right now. It’s an excellent time to get coverage through the end of the year.
One item we’ve been watching very closely is the chia crop in South America. There was a lot of stuff planted, although it was planted a little bit late. People had concerns that maybe we were going to enter a time when there might be some frost. However, it’s been really hot and dry down there and that’s led to people being able to start harvesting a little earlier than anticipated. We’ve already heard of people being able to start harvesting this week with chia seeds, so we should see the new crops start getting into the factories in early July and start shipping out of the factories by the middle of July. The prices have softened for the new crop. However, we do caution you that there will be a lull as there is every year, with not many people purchasing because they anticipated the price to drop, meaning that there’s not going to be a lot of inventory available until a new crop arrives. The transit time from South America to the West Coast sometimes can be upwards of 90 days. Last year we saw chia not arrive until October and November on the West Coast, so everybody was anxiously awaiting it. So, I would say get your coverage at least through October right now if you can, and then start taking advantage of some of the prices that are going to be coming in as the price lowers down. It’s hard to really put the needle on when the best time is to book the chia. Traditionally, as we start to see the harvest into July and August, that’s been a good time to start to get coverage. Last year was kind of out of the norm where prices shot up immensely in October after the Seattle Food Show when everybody went over there and sold a lot of chia and the prices never came down again after that. So historically, if you go off last year, the best time to buy is going to be sometime in August, September, or maybe even at the end of July. But we do anticipate the prices to be down on that a little bit as well.
Pumpkin seeds are a little strange right now. There’s not near the carryover that we saw last year going into the new crop. The carryover is very small and one of the things we’re watching is there is a holiday in China where they will consume a lot of pumpkin seeds domestically in October. So, there’s a good chance that what’s left of the carryover could be sucked up in China for domestic consumption as we’re waiting for the new crop to come out. Overall seems like plantings should be very similar to last year, so maybe we’ll see a little bit of price relief once the new crop starts to come in. The area of concern is they’re talking about the organic plantings being down, so we do think organic prices may be a little bit more firm. That’s kind of been the norm the last couple of years with the pumpkin seeds as well. But overall, the demand for pumpkin seeds isn’t near what we’ve seen in the past in the US either, or in Europe. So it just depends if there’s any demand that’s going to make the prices creep up at all, or if we’ll just kind of limp along until new crop comes out, and then we’ll see what happens.
Macadamia nuts continue to drop in prices to really low prices for great values, especially when you talk about style fours and style sixes. I’ve never seen prices this low and again, can’t emphasize never been a better time to try to use these innovatively in your products. The beautiful thing with macadamias is that the perception from the consumer is it’s a very expensive nut. So it means that your product is really high quality. And honestly, right now you can use macadamias with prices that they’re at, cheaper in some cases than you can several other nuts. You look at a macadamia style four, it’s cheaper than cashews are, it’s cheaper than almonds are. Anyway, it’s a great time to start looking at adding macadamia nuts into your mix or doing innovation with the products with that stuff. Some cool things you can do with macadamia nuts you can make it into butter. You can turn that butter into a dressing. You can take cashews and make them treat them like hummus almost as well, where you can cook them in and make a dip out of it. It’s just so many different things you can do that people haven’t been able to do before because they’re so expensive. But now’s a great time to start innovating with macadamia nuts.
Brazil nuts have been firming up. We did see some lows about six weeks ago. The European Union is the primary buyer of the Brazil nuts, and they’ve been booking some. Before, shippers were selling for less than what their costs were. But now with these bookings through Europe, they’re kind of in the driver’s seat now at origin. They don’t have to sell at these prices because they’ve got some bookings further out. So I think that you’ll see prices continue to firm up on Brazil nuts.
The banana market in the Philippines also has been a little bit bullish and ticking upward a little bit. Another fruit that we’ve been watching is the organic mango out of Mexico. Prices have gone up on most things out of Mexico, and mango is no exception. Also, the crop hasn’t been fantastic for the mango, so it’s been tough to get large-volume offers. We’re seeing prices coming in from Mexico that are anywhere from ¢50 to ¢75 higher than they were a year ago. So that’s one that we’re really watching is the organic mango out of Mexico because it has gone up considerably.
In addition to that, organic pineapple prices in Mexico are also quite expensive. Again, they’re up ¢50 to ¢75 from where they were a little while ago. Smirks has onboarded a supplier in Costa Rica and is bringing in products from Costa Rica now because it’s a little bit more competitive in price than the Mexican product is.
And one last item I want to bring up right now is oats. Anybody who buys oats is very familiar with what the market did last year when it more than doubled and we’re kind of in that hangover period. No one really imagined that we’d be able to correct the market as quick as it’s corrected, but most of the processors have a big carryover going into the new crop. It’s been indicated that crop plantings could be down as much as 40% in Canada. However, with this carryover, the prices still remain very bearish, and we’re starting to see levels on particularly gluten-free oats that we saw before the prices increased last year. So maybe you’ll start to see some of the lows that you saw two to three years ago in the gluten-free oat market. I think it’s really an excellent time to get coverage on gluten-free oats. A lot of the packers will do bookings, and Smirks can do bookings through July of 2024 right now on your gluten-free oats as well.
Nick Erker: There are a lot of coconut products out there from a lot of different origins, and we hope that you’ve enjoyed learning about some of them today. At Smirks, it’s one of our largest product categories, and any questions you have, we’d love to answer them for you and see how we could help you with your coconut needs. So, thank you for listening to this edition of Get The Scoop with Smirks, and we look forward to seeing you next time.
Nick Erker: So that’s it for this episode of Get the Scoop with Smirks podcast, where we bring you the latest market reports, insights into bulk ingredients, and their origins, as well as in-depth product information. So, if you have any questions, or feedback, or just want a sample to taste for yourself, visit the smirks.com website or email us at whatsnew@smirks.com. Never miss a future episode. Be sure to hit the subscribe button wherever you listen to your podcast. Thanks so much for tuning in.