US juice maker ITI brings Vietnam passion fruit plant online

ITI Tropicals, a leading U.S. supplier of fruit juice purees and concentrates, has opened a new passion fruit production facility in Vietnam.

Located in the Central Highlands province of Gia Lai, a key passion fruit growing zone in Vietnam and the country’s second-largest province, the plant offers ITI customers greater flexibility in budgeting, expanded product offerings, stability of production, increased availability, and diversity in applications, the New Jersey-headquartered company announced Wednesday.

The new factory is operated by passion fruit industry leader Quicornac, a multinational that also runs production plants in Ecuador and Peru.

“Quicornac and ITI have been in partnership to bring passion fruit to the US market for 32 years. We first started with the plant in Ecuador, opened in 1989. Then, in 2008, Quicornac opened their plant in Peru and now a new plant in Vietnam to further diversify the sourcing,” Gert van Manen, president and founder of ITI Tropicals, said in a release.

“This helps mitigate environmental concerns and crop fluctuations, providing our customers with the supply confidence they need.”

The Vietnamese facility produces purple passion fruit, offering an additional choice to customers. The smaller, sweeter purple passion fruit functions as an additional alternative to bakery, jams, and jelly applications, providing a broad spectrum of flavors and taste, offering greater flexibility.

The U.S. producer states the Vietnamese plant is committed to the same level of food safety and product excellence as its sister plants in Peru and Ecuador. This includes technical requirements like the British Retail Consortium (BRC) third-party safety audit and process validations.

Gia Lai is currently home to about 21,500 hectares of fruit trees, including 4,500 hectares of passion fruit, with the purple ones preferred. The province is carrying out a plan to increase its passion fruit area to 20,000 hectares, the largest in the country, by 2025.

“With local favorable conditions for passion fruit as well as the presence of many enterprises specializing in cultivation and processing, passion fruit farmers in Gia Lai have great faith in this crop,” said Gia Lai provincial agriculture department director Luu Trung Nghia.