Ōpōtiki grower wins 2025 Kiwifruit Innovation Award
Brett Wotton, an Eastern Bay of Plenty kiwifruit grower and harvest contractor, has won the 2025 Kiwifruit Innovation Award for his work to support lifting fruit quality across the industry.
Called the ZAG innovation fund, the purpose is to attract innovative problem solvers from around the world to partner with Zespri to help them keep pace with an ever changing world.
Zespri chief executive Dan Mathieson says the pace of change is rapid right across the horticultural and primary sectors and it is becoming more challenging to grow a stable supply of great quality kiwifruit.
He says Zespri recognises that it’s facing some significant challenges and to overcome these it needs some of the best thinkers and innovators in the world.
“We need to tap into people and companies who can bring new technologies and ideas to help us accelerate our process to find solutions to some of these challenges – especially around climate change, fruit quality packaging, worker welfare and health and nutrition.”
Mathieson says while Zespri has done very well in this space in the past, it recognises that it has to do better. With that in mind he says it wants to partner with the best companies and people in the world who can find solutions and generate new ideas and technologies that will benefit the kiwifruit industry and the wider horticulture sector.
