Behind the scenes of Britain’s biggest pumpkin grower as Halloween approaches

The arrival of pumpkins in supermarkets has come to mark the beginning of autumn, in the same way that Christmas trees have become an emblem of the Christmas holidays.

They have become an essential part of October and Halloween for shoppers and supermarkets alike.

This year, Tesco expects to sell millions, most of which will be removed and then discarded.

But did you know that everything sold in Britain’s biggest supermarket comes from a farm in Wisbech, Cambridgeshire?

Tesco has used Oakley Farms as a pumpkin supplier since 1996, when it placed an initial order for just 200 pumpkins.

It now expects to produce 5 million this year and is the largest producer in the country.

We visited the farm to find out how pumpkins have become a Halloween staple and exactly how they get from the farm to the store.

How are pumpkins harvested?

This week, Tesco will bring its first pumpkins to stores to mark the start of the autumn season.

Last year, the supermarket sold 2.5 million pumpkins to its customers.

Even with that in mind, the sheer number of pumpkins Oakley has produced when I visited in the last week of September is overwhelming.

While there are plenty of pumpkins left in the fields, to be picked in the coming weeks, by the time I get there, two-thirds have been harvested.

Thousands of pumpkins are kept in greenhouses where they are left to cure for weeks at a time.

Of the giant pumpkins, 85,000 are already collected and stored in one of the storage spaces, while a staggering 800,000 large pumpkins are in another.

Pumpkins are planted in May before some are harvested in August and into September.

They are then “cured” in greenhouses, where the temperature is usually between 20 and 25 degrees.

In addition to millions of pumpkins, Oakley also grows zucchini and other vegetables year-round and, interestingly, watermelons in the summer.

Fortunately, pumpkins seem to be a low maintenance plant. “They thrive on hot, sunny days and warm nights,” says farm manager Tom Brown.

However, the way pumpkins are distributed in the field means that farmers cannot use machinery to raise and lower them, but instead rely on them being harvested by hand, making it a labor-intensive crop. .

While Tesco sells some edible varieties, the vast majority of those sold are the carved variety, which has less meat, as well as some “novelty” miniature and colored pumpkins.

Before being shipped to stores, pumpkins are measured by size rather than weight, something the farm changed in 2005 when more customers bought them for carving, not eating.

“We try to make carving as easy as possible, you don’t want to have to struggle with so much meat,” says purchasing director Lucy Moss.

Why it is essential to “maintain quality” of pumpkins

As with other vegetables, the shape and size of pumpkins are essential, but their keeping quality (how long they last) is of equal importance.

Business manager Steve Whitworth, who has worked at the farm for 22 years, tells me that curing the pumpkins is essential, hence the glass houses.

‘We’re putting pumpkins in stores imminently that people will buy, take home and carve around Halloween. We don’t want to offer something that won’t last.’

The idea is that any waste or decomposition is captured early and before it is placed in stores. The last thing Oakley or Tesco want is rotting pumpkins at the bottom of their sales bins.

Whitworth keeps the secrets of curing its pumpkins under wraps, largely because other retailers have a completely different process, which usually involves picking pumpkins straight from the field.

The average curing time is between three and four weeks, although the first pumpkins to be harvested will already be out of the house.

The harvests collected at the beginning of October will be the last to hit the stores.

“We manage our harvest differently than other growers because we want to make sure we have harvested our harvest,” Whitworth says.

‘We want to make sure he is covered. If there is a frost in mid-October, it will wipe them out.

‘If we’ve seen where the crop is a little greener, we want to bring it in and turn it orange. We want to make sure that enough of the crop is sorted, cut, counted and prepared for the fall.’

But, as with all agriculture, its longevity will be at the mercy of the climate. Pumpkins themselves don’t need much water, but they can withstand a period of sustained rain.

However, when it rains for a month, as it did in 2014, it can ruin the plant. While Oakley was able to get the pumpkins into Tesco stores, their shelf life was significantly affected.

“We ended up compacting the supply chain so people wouldn’t be disappointed,” Whitworth says. “If we had put in much earlier, they would have been triggered in the stores or in the customer.”

How Tesco manages demand

Glass houses are just the first step in the equation. Getting pumpkins from the farm to stores is a carefully managed process.

Growing demand for pumpkins means Oakley and purchasing manager Moss are in constant communication, helped by their own pumpkin Whatsapp group.

Last year, Oakley produced 2.5 million pumpkins for Tesco. This year the supermarket hopes to sell even more, although the exact forecast is confidential.

But how does Tesco know how many pumpkins they will need throughout the month?

Most importantly, the work doesn’t stop as soon as the pumpkins are harvested and taken to the stores.

“Every day we will check sales and compare them to the previous year,” says Moss. ‘If a line is short, do we need to plan a promotion to get more stock? Or is there something we can do to move towards a different line?

‘It’s about adjusting throughout the month where we are compared to the previous year… If Oakley says we have a lot more of this crop and we bring in more giants than standards, we can be flexible in terms of how we deal with it. ‘

How Halloween could be as big as Christmas

Oakley began growing pumpkins to meet the needs of nearby U.S. air bases in the 1990s.

“Pumpkins back then probably weren’t the event they were in the UK,” Whitworth says. “We started selling little trays of pumpkins.”

Now pumpkins have become the third biggest event for Tesco, behind Christmas and Easter.

“We want it to be on the scale that Christmas is, that’s our goal,” says Moss.

‘There are a lot of possibilities there, it’s just about getting customers to use it in the right way. “People are being a lot more adventurous in terms of food.”

The two most popular lines remain the standard and large carved variety, which account for about 80 percent of the volume.

This has no doubt been helped by the fact that the pumpkins arrive in stores so early, and Tesco can guarantee that they will stay fresh thanks to Oakley’s curing process.

“When you go to the store, the pumpkins are the focus of the event, so we’ll have them in big black bins at the front of the store,” Moss says. “A lot of times that draws people in, so they act as a leading edge marker and a little bit of a marker for the fall.”

It means that there is more of a rush in the first weeks of putting it in the store, but between 85 and 90 percent of sales will still come in the last 10 days.

There has been a growing demand for decorative products, including red and white pumpkins, as well as miniature pumpkins.

Demand comes mainly from commercialized urban areas, particularly from those living in flats in London and other major cities. So much so that their line of novelties sold out last year.

“People don’t really have the option of putting a carved pumpkin outside the door, so they turn it into a decorative element inside, which makes their homes feel more autumnal,” says Moss.

For Tesco, it might be the start of pumpkin season, but for Brown, Whitworth and their team, there is no such thing.

Brown is already starting to consider how he might manage the land for next year. The work to get pumpkins to stores never stops.

Pumpkins may only be in stores for a month, but work for next Halloween starts now.