Kiwi fruit, Kiwis, Chinese gooseberries. However you slice them New Zealanders love them. The
eponymous fruit is in season at the moment and Zespri in the company in charge of picking,
packing and sending millions of kiwi fruit across the world. On a damp slightly cold
autumn day in Te Puke, Tauranga. Grower Jeff Roderick walked us through the vines and explained
what makes this part of New Zealand so good for growing kiwi fruit.
I've looked all round the world at different kiwifruit areas and talked to lots of growers
from different countries and I think we've probably got optimum conditions around Te
Puke. We've got good temperature and good temperature range, we still getting winter
chill, enough of it which you need for flowers for next year. Even though with climate change
the climate is changing slightly. We've got really good volcanic loam soils, we've got
good runoff into the gully so we’re pretty frost free around this area.
What do you have to do in the process of the kiwi fruit growing to make sure that they're
healthy and they're good quality fruit? The first thing you need is good locations.
Second thing I'll say is recognize the needs of the vines and probably overarching all
that is having good labour. So we do the basics of fertilizer which is organic, so we have
more compost and fishmeal and stuff like that, but in our case we’re pretty minimal as
to what we put on to our vines. You just nurture the vines all the way through.
And you basically be flexible, because every year nature throws you a different curveball.
this is true kiwi fruit country with cultivated vines as far as the eye can see. Under the
vines next to us is a team of pickers, about 20 of them. Each has a specially designed
basket on a harness on their front, which they fill with fruit, unhooking a flap at
the bottom to dump the fruit into a bin when their pack gets full. Four bins are on a wheeled
base, which low tractors drive beneath the vines to collect. So how many fruit could
you pick in a day here? It's not as many as I used to, I try to avoid
picking them now. But no, seriously, we expect the staff to pick 400 kilos per labour unit
per hour. As a gang will be picking about 80 thousand kilos. So I did the tonnage once
per person per season. It’s pretty scary. What they're looking for is the perfect fruit.
But what does the perfect fruit look like? So what would we look for in a good kiwi fruit,
and what will happen to it when it comes off the vine?
Well, the first thing you look for for your customer, and you can't see that is the actual
data on dry matter and sugar levels. So you gotta do it by taste. So you gotta trust us
as an industry that we will time the harvesting of the crop to optimize the sensory experience.
A fruit like that, I would say, I mean, I'm happy to grow a fruit like that. It's good,
it's good shape, it's good colour. It'll look really good in the marketplace sitting on
the shelf. And all these fruits are here. If you look, they are pristine looking fruit.
The customer is the most important part of the whole chain of events, which means that
if we don't have customers that put that piece of fruit in their shopping trolley in the
Northern Hemisphere, then we don't have an industry.
After the fruit is picked the wooden bins loaded onto trucks to be driven down the road
to Trevelyan’s pack house. It's the largest single site pack house in New Zealand. James
Trevelyan is the managing director and the son of John and Elizabeth Trevelyan who started
the pack house in the 70s, building it from just 186 crates of kiwi fruit a year to over
15 million crates today. If you look behind, that's the family home
and I we moved here as a family I think about 53 years ago, my mother and father bought
this bare block of land and dad was passionate with trees so he started planting.
He took us through the journey of a kiwi fruit from when it arrives at the pack house.
So when the fruit arrives, it scanned in on site. So we know its on site, we give it a
home and will rest the fruit for a couple of days to heal the picking wound at the top
of the fruit. And then after a couple of days, we will then process it, weigh the bin. And
we know how much fruit is in the process. So we can balance the equation so we don't
lose anything. And then we brush it to remove the excess fur on the fruit, then we sort
it to a Zespri standard. And then we put it in a tray and put a traceability sticker on
the box put on a pallet. So that box has a relationship with all those other boxes on
the pallet, we document it, we strap it and then we put it through our cool chain so we
are essentially slowly cooling it down to its target temperature, we will receive orders
from Zespri. And then we match those orders with fruit that is right for that order essentially.
When we tip it out of the bin with the gold variety, there can be soft fruit that we need
to take out of the population. So we spread it all out. And then we look for those that
are explosive or unsound we will put it under the cameras and those cameras then are looking
for defects in the fruit and then from there, the population gets separated. If the cameras
aren't happy with what it sees, but unsure it'll go to the human eye. If the cameras
says ‘oh I don’t see anything wrong with this,’ it'll just go straight down the process
and be packed into a into a tray. Once sorted it packed and labelled the fruit
or bailed up and begin the next part of their journey to the port of Tauranga. Each individual
box has a label printed on it to tell you where it has come from and where in the world
it's going to go. When they reach the port the vans and crates scanned in. Ian Mearns
the Chief Executive of Tauranga Kiwifruit Logistics takes us to the bridge of the cargo
ship and explains what happens. So what we're doing was we pre-receiving cargo
to be loaded onto the ship. And we normally start pre loading before the ship arrives.
So when the product is arriving on the wharf, it's going through some data entry processes
and some quality checks and then getting presented to load at the ship. So we've got a cool store
here, which can store around about 5000 pallets of kiwi fruit. And we use that to pretty simple
the fruit for loading during the night at a new store was commissioned in 2018. And
yeah, this is the latest technology for keeping fruit at the right temperature. typically
on a on a ship we’re loading about 5 and a half thousand pallets of kiwi fruit. And
to load five and a half thousand pallets of kiwi fruit we've got around about 30 people
involved from a manning perspective. And the ship will take between 24 and 36 hours to
load and we’re loading 24 hours a day, seven days a week. So as soon as it arrives, it's
loaded it’s on it’s way.
I typically describe them as like a car park building, it's just a whole lot of layers
of loading fruit, and on one deck and closing that deck and loading another deck and another
deck and another. So just like a car park building inside.
So you can see the pallets, people scanning the pallets down there. What's happening?
It’s the next part of the scanning process on the wharf in terms of that data capture.
So we're scanning the pallets onto the ship in a specific space. And that when the teleclark
is scanning the pallets it's making sure that as well that there's pallets should be loaded
for the ship. And then when the ship is completed, it's part of the documentation process. So
we're telling the arrival port that all these pallets are in this space they know where
everything is on the ship Four cranes on the ship begin to hoist the
kiwi fruit into the hold, each crate dangling nervously as it's winched high over the side
of the ship and lowered into the cavernous hold. This ship will start its journey tomorrow.
This ship will be going to Japan first, to discharge in two ports in Japan. And then
going on to Korea to discharge. The ship will take about two weeks to reach
its first destination. A technician on board will monitor the kiwi fruit closely keeping
an eye on how warm or cold they are and adding amounts of ripening gas to sections to ensure
when the fruit reaches its destination it's ready to eat. Stewart Ede Zespri Technical
Operations Manager explains ‘So when it arrives at the destination the
product starts to get discharged and then as soon as the products been cleared through
customs we’ll have checkers that are basically inspecting around 5% of the product and are
also getting an indication of what their firmness is and then delivering straight out the door.
This product doesn't sit around the idea of the whole kiwi start program, which is the
product that we're conditioning is that it's to get onto the retail shelves as quick as
possible really. The kiwi fruit from orchards in Tauranga will
end up as far away as Europe. I asked Jeff Roderick, where is the furthest away he has
seen his kiwi fruit? I've seen them in Eastern Europe, and I've
seen my fruit offload off wharves in Japan saw some in Los Angeles six months ago, nine
months ago. Do you feel proud to see it there?
Definitely feel proud. That's the whole reason of our existence is to do that. And that's
the whole the connection thing that we should have with our customers. And yeah, of course
it makes you feel proud.