Narrator: This is a golden kiwi,
a unique strain of kiwifruit developed through crossbreeding
to be sweeter and softer than a normal green kiwi.
Che: Green's old school.
Green is big, brown,
very different sorts of shapes.
Gold just looks like a —
it's a different, more subtle palette, sweeter,
and it's a more consistent piece of fruit.
Narrator: Even though they're smaller,
golden kiwis cost almost twice as much as green kiwis.
In fact, they're so valuable
that some sprouts have been smuggled out of New Zealand
and sold in lots for 60,000 New Zealand dollars.
That's because this specific kiwi can't be grown
without permission from its copyright holder, Zespri,
unless you want to be sued and ordered to pay NZ$14 million,
like one international smuggler was.
Growing golden kiwis is so lucrative
that it's caused a feud between New Zealand and China,
where the fruit is native.
But how do you copyright a fruit?
And what exactly makes these kiwis so expensive?
It's a very easy fruit to eat. It's very soft
without being squashy or squishy.
Yeah, it's got a hint of melon with it,
with the kiwifruit.
Look, it's a beautiful-tasting fruit. It really is.
Narrator: While green kiwis have a thick, hairy skin
that provides a protective layer,
golden kiwis are completely hairless
and much more easily damaged.
Here at Wiroa Orchard, located in Kerikeri
in the heart of Northland, New Zealand,
golden kiwis are carefully harvested with gloved hands.
This drives up labor costs.
Pieter: It's a very easy fruit to pick,
but you must take a lot of care not to damage it.
We have teams of pickers that have picking bags
and wear gloves on their hands
so that they don't damage the fruit with their fingernails.
And it's all done by hand,
by snapping the fruit off and putting it into a bag,
and then the bags are emptied into bins.
A team of 15 pickers, when they're doing well,
they would be filling a bin
roughly every three to four minutes.
Narrator: But before Pieter and his team
are even allowed to harvest,
a sample from the orchard must meet certain criteria.
Pieter: Taste is one. Number of seeds
or the color of the seeds, the blackness of the seeds.
You can't just have one or two
or three out of the five pass, or whatever it is.
You must pass on all of them.
Narrator: This is because this particular variety
of golden kiwi, called SunGold, is controlled by Zespri,
a cooperative of kiwifruit growers in New Zealand.
Zespri created SunGold
by crossbreeding different yellow kiwis.
Che: Within two years, it was a delicious,
large golden globe,
and it was just a perfect piece of fruit.
Narrator: And it was this perfected strain
that helped New Zealand rebuild its kiwi industry.
In 2010, disease nearly wiped out
most of the country's kiwi orchards,
causing NZ$900 million worth of damage.
But one newly developed kiwi strain resisted infection:
Zespri SunGold.
SunGold quickly became popular
for its consistently sweet taste
and has proved more profitable than its green counterpart.
Fast-forward to today,
and this perfected strain makes up about 67%,
or NZ$1.9 billion, of New Zealand's kiwi export value.
But not just anyone can grow these kiwis.
Zespri only releases a certain number
of licenses every year, and growers bid on them.
In 2022, the median price for a SunGold license
hit NZ$801,000 per hectare.
We have IP protections around who's able to grow it
and who shouldn't be growing it.
And gold kiwifruit is a handcrafted product.
Yeah, we grow it in nature, but so many hours go into it.
They get touched so much, and whether it be fertilization,
pruning, tying down the fruiting wood,
thinning flowers, it just needs so much attention.
Narrator: But golden kiwis weren't always this perfect.
When they first hit New Zealand's produce market
10 years ago, the fruits looked and tasted a lot different.
That fruit was disgusting.
They were these small, hard bullets.
It was right at the start of
when we'd started growing it on scale as a country,
and like all new bits of fruit,
you need to figure out how to grow it.
Narrator: Today, it can take five years
before a new SunGold kiwi orchard is ready for harvest.
Joshua Murphy is in charge of planting golden kiwis
here at Wiroa Orchard,
one of the largest commercial orchards in the region.
The orchard contains about 72 hectares of gold kiwis.
It's on Joshua to strategically cultivate vines
that will bear high-quality fruit
for the next 30 to 50 years.
Joshua: It's not just a kind of,
we chuck the plant in the ground
and it grows a million fruit that big, you know?
No, there's actually a lot of selection.
If we overcrop it too much,
we'll get a bunch of fruit like that
that aren't going to sell.
So we have to select how many canes
we put into the canopy in the winter pruning.
Narrator: Starting in June, during New Zealand's wintertime,
Joshua begins pruning the vines
and training its canes, or branches,
to grow on a trellis and eventually form a canopy.
Joshua: Yeah, so this system that I'm doing here
with the poles and the strings,
again, it's based on a science,
because these canes will grow quicker
and longer and stronger growing on that direction
rather than just letting them flap in the wind.
Narrator: Training the vines to grow upward
also forces the plants to store more sugar at the top,
resulting in sweeter kiwis.
I think it's quite nice.
My partner, she says it's like a mix
between a kiwifruit
and a tamarillo.
Yeah, they're more of a designer fruit,
if that makes any sense.
The green ones are quite nice too,
but the gold ones have just got that extra bit in them.
I'll eat a few each season,
but I don't indulge myself in them too much.
No, I make desserts out of them.
Narrator: A golden-kiwi orchard typically needs
more hands on deck because of its large size.
Since golden-kiwi vines produce less fruit,
the orchards are usually larger than those for green kiwis.
A typical green-kiwi orchard
might have 12,000 to 14,000 trees per hectare.
Meanwhile, a golden-kiwi orchard
needs 16,000 to 18,000 trees per hectare
to produce enough fruit to make it worth it for farmers.
So, the work I'm doing now on this plant here
gets done on about 80,000 plants in this orchard.
And this is just the very initial stage
of setting up the leaders.
Narrator: Joshua strategically trims the vines
to produce these perfectly sweet golden kiwis.
Depending on the amount of growth,
it takes him anywhere from five to 20 minutes per plant.
Thinning out the vines by hand allows him to target
canes that have started to produce misshapen fruit.
Doing this also raises labor costs,
since all the thinning must be done by an experienced hand.
Most people I'd say that are overseas
that are buying a kiwifruit,
they probably think it comes from a tree.
You know, they probably think someone's just planted a tree.
I don't think a lot of people actually understand
how much labor and work
goes into creating the product that they're eating.
Narrator: After the kiwis are harvested,
every kiwi is carefully inspected.
Che: Consumers don't want to go one day in the supermarket
looking for their gold kiwifruit
and find that it's not there anymore
or that it tastes slightly different
or the quality's not as good.
No one likes a blemish.
And it's, in some ways, a bit sad
because it still tastes just as nice,
but premium fruit needs to look perfect,
and gold kiwifruit is pretty unforgiving
because it's such a smooth, round piece of fruit.
It looks beautiful.
Any mark on it, you can notice it.
Narrator: Shipping from New Zealand to most countries
is already quite expensive due to the distance.
Che: Yeah, not many ships come down here.
There isn't that much going on
down in Aotearoa, New Zealand,
that you need a big container ship for,
outside of horticulture and dairy and meat.
Therefore, the cost of shipping, it's pretty expensive
when it comes to the contribution of that cost
to the price of a piece of fruit.
Narrator: Luckily, though,
golden kiwis don't expire quickly —
another quality that sets them apart from green kiwis.
Zespri says that while a ripe green kiwi
lasts up to five days, a golden kiwi can last up to seven.
The grower-owned co-op is the main exporter
of New Zealand's kiwifruits.
Today, the island country
controls 30% of the global kiwi supply.
Che: In a way, Zespri's coordinating all those efforts
of New Zealand kiwifruit growers
into a coordinated breeding program.
And it's one of the larger breeding programs in the world
when it comes to horticulture.
And as a result, we get these beautiful pieces of fruit.
But it is a lot of work to get to that end point
of a beautiful piece of gold kiwifruit in the supermarket.
Narrator: However, after a kiwi grower
successfully smuggled SunGold sprouts overseas,
a number of illegal orchards popped up in China.
Zespri has attempted to regain control
of its golden-kiwi strain, but it may be too late.
The smuggler was fined for NZ$14 million in damages,
but since then, the unauthorized SunGold orchards
have doubled in size.
Ironically, kiwis originated in China,
where they're known as gooseberries.
While other countries struggled
to commercialize the gooseberry,
New Zealand's humid climate has made it ideal
for cultivating and perfecting this unique fruit.
And now, New Zealand's golden kiwis
are still the, well, gold standard.
Joshua: I actually went to Myanmar a few years ago,
which is next to Vietnam and that,
and I went in the supermarkets there,
and I saw the kiwifruit there,
and this was just after we'd finished the harvest.
You know, it had the Zespri sticker
and stuff like that on it.
So it's actually pretty cool to see
that it's an international product,
especially coming from New Zealand.
You know, for a little country
with not much of a population
down at the bottom of the Earth,
we've produced some pretty good stuff.