Welcome to this week’s edition of Frankly Speaking, our update to growers and suppliers of Seeka bringing you up to date with our latest .
In briefing you, firstly we have just clocked through our first million trays packed. While all sites and all machines are packing extended day shifts, really we are very tight on people numbers. The decision to require a 14 day isolation on people arriving in New Zealand impacts RSE workers scheduled in from Malaysia for mainpack, and we are re-routing workers from the Solomon Islands so they do not have to transit through Brisbane (they will come via Fiji). Currently Seeka has about 500 worker vacancies to run all shifts and all machines, of which 200 will be solved with the RSE’s. Adding to this pressure is that the backpackers largely aren’t in New Zealand and we are tight for numbers. So if you know of people looking for work at a dynamic kiwifruit company, earn great money, with fantastic people and leadership – well please send them to us!
While we are pretty satisfied with the start at Seeka, I think it would be fair to say we are more than disappointed with the process and reporting of SunGold kiwistart fruit maturity. In spite of the best efforts of some very dedicated people – honestly it’s been a shambles. Thankfully the industry, led by Blair Hamill, has decisively stepped in to take control, by closing the cap for the first past the post period for SunGold and moving to contracted volumes. It’s a sensible decision, which should take the pressure off and also hopefully deliver a safer environment. The testing from here will now be on a two day turn around rather than one. Our CRM’s will closely monitor the clearances to make sure that each grower’s position is maximised and everyone knows exactly where they are at. Early SunGold packouts are light on estimate – around 20% with an average size of 29.67.
Honestly – we are aghast by the complexity of the fruit maturity processes, the added complexity from last year and the failure of the Maturity Review Committee to foresee the risk being taken in changing the criteria from last year. No one seems to have taken the grower, supplier or lab perspective and they made the criteria even more complex seemingly for no benefit. No doubt this will get reviewed and improved for next year but looking backwards you can justifiably shake your head. Blair has assured us it will be much better next year.
There have been a few inevitable near misses in the Company with dropped bins and boxes as people rush to hit deadlines and get fruit moving. Thankfully these are just near misses. No job is so important that it can’t be done safely. And important learnings from near misses will ensure we don’t have a serious harm incident.
Finally I am happy to report that the first of the kiwifruit has been loaded from Seeka for 2020. We have delivered the first 50k trays to the port for the first 100k tray order. The is that the ports in China are open, product is moving across the wharves and we are hopeful of smooth product delivery into our key Asian markets early in the season.
To the numbers:
| SunGold conventional trays | Industry packed 4.38m | Seeka 0.9m (21.0%) |
| Average size | Industry 29.49 | Seeka 29.67 |
| Seeka in store | 0.9m | On order 1.0m |
Kind regards
Michael
Seeka Key
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