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Abstract Most rural communities use indigenous fruits as an integral part of their diets by processing them into value-added products such as alcoholic beverages, jam, juice, and nuts/dried fruits. Despite the claim that these products are rich in vitamins and energy, they are still relatively underutilised due to their low availability at mainstream retailers. The data was collected from 384 participants in Bushbuckridge in Mpumalanga Province and the Statistical Package for the Social Sciences (SPSS) was used to analyse the consumers’ perceptions on indigenous fruit value-added products. Principal component analysis was applied, and the study results revealed that consumers preferred buying indigenous fruit value-added products over exotic fruit value-added products. Data on indigenous fruit value-added products’ market availability and accessibility was extracted and the data showed that they were perceived as important variables by consumers. Furthermore, consumers (96.4%) indicated that they would purchase marula fruit value-added products instead of other products (wild sour plum, orange monkey and wild medlar). Regarding access to indigenous value-added products, 24.7% of the participants strongly agreed and 27.6% agreed that they do have access. Therefore, it is recommended that interventions to create awareness and promote the sale and consumption of the indigenous fruit value-added products should be prioritised at events such as indigenous festivals, as well as at local retailers.

Abstract Background The agricultural economy has little room for emerging farmers and there is no strong support system available for the small-scale farmers venturing in agro-processing. In this study, “access to agro-processing training” refers to any processing training rendered to small-scale crop farmers to equip them when venturing in to agro-processing. Small-scale crop farmers trained with high knowledge in processing and skills are pre-disposed to adopting processing as a strategy of making their processed products penetrate the agro-processing market. Methodology Data were collected from 307 small-scale crop farmers and STATA version 15 was used to perform fractional regression analyses to determine factors influencing access to training from the five types of agro-processing training (marketing training, processing training, record-keeping training, financial management training and business-plan training). Results The results revealed that 26% of the small-scale crop farmers had no access to agro-processing training and 74% of the small-scale crop farmers had access to training. Farming experience had significant influence on the access to agro-processing training for small-scale farmers to function efficiently in the agro-processing industry at 5% level of significance and their coefficient was positive. Conclusion Small-scale crop farmers with less farming experience should be encouraged to participate in the agro-processing sector as their participation can result in improved income and food security at the household levels. Furthermore, new agro-processing training programmes should be encouraged as trained farmers are more likely to participate in the value addition activities of agro-processing.