After over five years of negotiations, the US Department of Agriculture officially licenced the import of the fruit earlier this year, making it the seventh fresh fruit of Vietnam permitted to enter the market, following mango, longan, lychee, dragon fruit, rambutan, and star apple.
Chanh Thu Fruit Import - Export Group Joint Stock Company in the Mekong Delta province of Ben Tre's Cho Lach district is the exporter of the first batch of pomelos.
In the US, the Vietnamese pomelos will be initially distributed on the supermarket systems in the Washington, Maryland, and Virginia states and Philadelphia in the state of New Jersey.
Vietnam’s pomelo plantations cover 105,400 ha in total, yielding nearly 905,000 tonnes annually. Of the total area, Ben Tre accounts for about 10,000 ha with an annual productivity of more than 200,000 tonnes.
The province has so far been granted 25 planting area codes to export green-skin pomelos to the US and the EU. The 11 codes serving the US market span 156.76 ha and produce 3,135 tonnes on an annual basis.
The US's annual fruit consumption demand is up to 12 million tonnes.
