Wednesday, 07 December 2016 09:55

Record-breaking kiwifruit season comes to end

Written by Pam Tipa

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The kiwifruit season has ended with a record-breaking year, with new variety Zespri SunGold up 68% from last year to 46 million trays as vines come into full production.

The last of 67 refrigerated ships chartered for the season left the Port of Tauranga in mid-November.

Zespri chief operating officer Simon Limmer says every season brings its challenges and people have worked incredibly hard across the industry to achieve another strong result.

“The industry investment in infrastructure has meant that the increased SunGold volumes have been processed well this season,” says Limmer.

“We’re on track to more than double sales revenue from nearly $2 billion last season to $4.5b by 2025.

“Zespri’s in-market teams are driving sales for the last few weeks of the NZ sales season and the first sales of our northern hemisphere-grown SunGold are underway in Europe, with product on the water to Asia.”

Zespri sources premium-quality kiwifruit from northern hemisphere orchards to supply the market for the few months of the year when NZ-grown kiwifruit is not available.

The forecast volumes for the 2016 NZ season are 80 million trays of Green, 46m trays of SunGold and 3.8m trays of Organic Green. Going into the Zespri global supply season, the forecast volumes are 10.5m trays of Zespri Green and 6m trays of gold (SunGold and Gold) from Zespri’s northern hemisphere supplying orchards.

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