Frankly Speaking

Welcome to this week’s update to our growers and stakeholders. Well hasn’t the world changed in a week!

Firstly, I would note that in spite of all the life throws at us, Eurofins shambles, labour shortages and worldwide pandemic – Seeka has managed to harvest and pack some 2.7 million trays of kiwifruit and better still loaded out 600,000 trays. We have got fruit in front of us to process bringing employment at a time of wholesale economic disruption and bringing export earnings to New Zealand from a nutritious and healthy fruit at a time that our export earnings are tanking. We understand from Government officials that fruit and food processing are likely to be considered an essential service as the COVID-19 response and alert level elevates.

We are deploying our contingency plans. Our operations are essentially locked off to the outside world – and no external people can go in the packhouses at the moment (unfortunately including growers). We understand how we will redirect fruit should we lose a packhouse through an outbreak, and we understand how we will bring that packhouse back into operation.

Our management team and all support staff are moving to work from home or remotely. These plans had been in place for recent weeks and already in place for IT support, payroll, supply and some finance functions. We are moving to fully deploy the plan now. We will curtail some of the functions we used to do where this provides heightened transmission risk. It's sensible.

We are directly engaged with the Government and received a response that can only be described as fantastic. As an example, within 30 minutes of putting a shout out to the Government over the labour shortage along with responding to the containment protocols – we are talking to senior officials in MSD and MBIE.  And we have directly engaged with senior officials at MPI working out positive steps to take with containment protocols. The response from Government and their engagement has been tremendous and should be applauded.

We have bulked up our resourcing, energy and sparkle around employment and seasonal labour. I am appreciative that Annmarie is back – she has temporarily left her campervan, and come out of retirement to head up our drive to get workers in the sheds so we can run all sheds and effect out contingency plan. As you would expect – she is an instant hit – we have recruited 200 people since last Thursday night but still are 700 short to be able to run all shifts when we get to peak load in a few weeks’ time. We are progressively bringing nightshifts on. We are going to need more people as normal staff turnover always occurs. But the sign-ups are happening and there is great focus and energy.

The issues at Eurofins continue to hinder our drive to be nimble. It’s really the computer systems that have let the industry down. They have been overwhelmed by an overly complex maturity requirement – so complex that the world’s greatest supercomputer would struggle to work it out. There has been a clear failure by the maturity review committee to realise this key risk. Thankfully Blair has mobilised and is sorting it. It will take a few more days to get on top of it. Our own VLS lab, contracted to process 130 samples per day and capacity to that, it has been processing 180 samples per day. The issue has been system access to log the sample results into. Honestly, Tracy and the team are doing a great job within a shambolic system.

There have been numerous meetings and discussions across the industry as ideas float to the surface how to remedy the situation. We need to make sure that these solutions aren’t akin to panic buying – setting up a whole set of unforeseen new issues.  Our approach is that the plan is in place - well set – and that decisions now need to show clear purpose and real leadership.

To the numbers      

Kind regards and safe harvesting

Michael