Emart24 Launches '3+4 Apple' to Continue the Super Discount Banana Craze

[Asia Economy Reporter Minyoung Cha] Emart24 has once again introduced super-discounted fruit products this year, following last year.

Convenience store Emart24 launched 3+4 apples on the 27th, meaning customers get 4 apples for the price of 3. They offered a set of 7 apples for 3,800 won. The price per apple is 543 won, which is 58% cheaper compared to a single washed apple priced at 1,300 won.

Emart24 noted that while red apples are traded at high prices, apples that are less colored or have irregular shapes are traded at lower prices due to lower marketability. Even so, there were few buyers, making it difficult for producers to handle the surplus. Therefore, they sourced apples at low prices from Mungyeong, a region famous for apple production, to sell them.

This apple sale was made possible thanks to the positive response to the previously introduced 2+3 bananas. In July last year, Emart24 launched 2+3 super-discounted bananas, meaning customers get 3 bananas for the price of 2. The price per banana was 310 won. These were bananas that were not long and straight but bent and varied in size, resulting in lower marketability.

As Emart24 packaged and sold bananas based on weight, from July when the 2+3 bananas were launched until the end of the year, sales of bananas and the entire fruit category increased by 182.7% (bananas) and 138.4% (all fruits) compared to the same period the previous year. Considering that the fruit category sales growth rate was 40.1% from January to June 2019 before the product launch, the difference in sales growth is clearly noticeable.

Park Sanghyun, Emart24’s fruit buyer, said, “Since many customers replace breakfast with apples, we introduced the 3+4 apples so they can enjoy one apple economically each day for a week,” adding, “We expect the success of 3+4 apples to also help farmers who are struggling to find sales channels for apples with lower marketability.”

This content was produced with the assistance of AI translation services.