Ready to Join Global Fresh Fruit Market, PT Great Giant Pineapple Starts Partnership with IPB

IPB University (IPB) signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with PT Great Giant Pineapple. The signing was done in Executive Lounge, IPB Baranangsiang Campus, Bogor (23/05). This MoU includes agreements on several partnerships in researches and commercialization of IPB innovations.

IPB Rector, Dr. Arif Satria said several things related to the importance of this partnership. IPB as a higher education institution who has produced 400 innovations for Indonesia, certainly has challenges in making the innovations beneficial for people.

“I think the innovations in IPB can be utilized well by PT Great Giant Pineapple to develop its business. Besides that, we have instructed each faculty to have innovation displays so the public can see them. So, with this partnership I hope that IPB’s innovation displays can be more publicized,” he said.

Dr. Arif Satria also talked about the urgency of Agriculture 4.0 development and how the private sectors contribute in it. There are already many researches about Agriculture 4.0 in IPB, but IPB still has challenges to apply them. Because of that, IPB now have Techno-Science Park which is a meeting point between academicians and business so that they could be a synergy in realizing Agriculture 4.0.

“I hope with this MoU we can move forward not only in varieties of pineapples, bananas, and apples, but also other fruits,” he added.

Welly Soegiono, the Director of PT Great Giant Pineapple also explained about his company’s performance in international fruit market. PT Great Giant Pineapple is an exporter of canned and fresh fruits. In 2018 they exported 13.000 containers of fruits to Asia, Middle East, and Europe regions.

“In 2019, we set a target to increase exports of fresh fruits, because in the future, the demand for fresh fruit will be higher than canned fruits. Because of that, we hope to use IPB’s innovations to increase our exported fresh fruit products,” said the businessman who is an alumnus of IPB batch 17.

Welly Soegiono also explained how PT Great Giant Pineapple contributes in prospering local farmers. PT Great Giant Pineapple now doesn’t only use Corporate Social Responsibility system, but they use Creating Share Value system instead. It is a system that helps fruit farmers to improve their production standards in quality and quantity so the products can be bought in higher price for exports.

“Because of that, we can prevent the price drop during harvest period. During that time the price would be stable because our products are export-quality. We feel that with this partnership, we can share more value for the company, the local farmers, and of course for IPB,” he said. (Ard)