The Study of the Fruit Wholesale Routes to Enhance Supply Chain Efficiency: A Case Study of Thai Charoen Fruit Wholesale Market

บทคัดย่อ

Thai Charoen Fruit Wholesale Market located in Phitsanulok province is the most well-known and biggest fruit wholesale market in the Lower North of Thailand. There are many kinds of fruit are distributed from the market to all regions of Thailand. This study aims to explore the route of the main kind of fruit and develop a guideline for efficiency improvement. The data of the market and discussion of the value of fruit showed that there are five main kinds of fruit composed of durian, orange, watermelon, pineapple, and mango respectively thus the five kinds of fruit were focused in the study. The statistics of fruit sources from statistical data from Office of Agricultural Economics and the information from informants were considered for the field area to collect data. The qualitative research was employed, and semi-structured questions were used in the interviews of the informants to collect data from the players in the fruit supply chain. The snowball technique was used to find the target. The total informants were 47 informants who were 36 farmers, 22 collectors/traders, 30 wholesalers, and 12 retailers (several informants play more than 1 role). The number of informants of each fruit depends on the data saturation to find the fruit routes. Content analysis is employed for data analysis. Due to the Thai Charoen Fruit Wholesale Market supporting fresh fruit in the region, the author aims to study and apply SFSC to the fruit routes of the market. Surprisingly, the research results showed that most fruits, especially durian, orange and watermelon differ from the SFSC assumption. The reason behind this is the farmer and middleman could earn more revenue by distribution to far away in other regions. durian is the favorite fruit to export to China by the big middleman. The rest of the fruits in the research were distributed to all regional domestic markets. The route of fruit in the market was found that most kinds of fruit come from the nearby areas and other regions. Moreover, the research result showed that some fruits can be developed to be more value-added as Agro-tourism which can earn more money with the story of fruits and farms. SFSC can applied to these kinds of fruits.