Week ended Sunday 20 September 2020Welcome to this week’s edition of Frankly Speaking – our grower and stakeholder update bringing you the latest Seeka and industry . Operationally the focus has remained on delivering Zespri excellent quality fruit while maximising the returns to our growers and minimising the fruit loss. We understand that there have been some suppliers who have not delivered the quality commitment to Zespri and want to assure our growers that Seeka is not one of them. Our brand commitment to quality and select excellence remains. Finger pointing in the industry does not help and Zespri should just call out those who have not delivered to the specification. SunGold is now ordered and in three weeks will be fully loaded out. Likewise Hayward conventional and organic continues to travel well. Seeka’s fruit quality remains good on and offshore for all varieties. The latest market sales report shows deliveries to customers and sales remain strong with potential upside to forecast. Really fruit loss is excellent – perhaps the best in the history of the industry. It is quite remarkable noting all the challenges that COVID-19 and labour shortages placed in the season. In spite of all these issues and the seeming pressure of soft fruit, we have delivered an outstanding result. Reflectively, the industry grew a crop in a taste environment, and harvested it on maturity standards ignoring taste and delivered the lowest fruit loss ever and a huge benefit to the industry and New Zealand, perhaps highlighting the unknown cost of running the taste system the way we have. On that theme, the industry has considered the taste system for 2021 with an experienced sub-committee set up to work it out. This Committee included Stewart Moss on behalf of Seeka Growers and they made considerable efforts over eight weeks to come up with a series of sensible recommendations. Unfortunately, Zespri and some players tinkered with the recommendations and then the industry was unable to get consensus when those recommendations came up to a lesser knowledgeable forum which I sat on. The whole shemozzle has gone out for consultation in the hope of finding a consensus. We should have just adopted the initial recommendations from the committee. We will report back when we know the outcome. Kind regards, Michael |
Seeka Key
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