Welcome to this week’s edition to Frankly Speaking, Seeka’s grower and stakeholder update. There has been a lot going on to report on.
Most importantly the fruit continues to hold up well, it is loading out well, and fruit loss across the industry is low and unremarkable – which is a good thing. Our fruit at Seeka and OPAC continues to perform well through the early stages of the storage season. Inventory managers and teams have been focussing on moving the right fruit first to ensure that the fruit in inventory has every chance of storing into the later stages of the season. Our own fruit loss is at or below the industry average. The OPAC SunGold fruit in Controlled Atmosphere storage has packed out well and there are “no-excuses-to-report” so far.
In the Industry there have been a number of important issues being discussed, which Seeka has found itself on the wrong side of the argument about. Most of these issues have been pre-discussed with the Seeka Growers Council and our views aligned. I intend to brief you about these over the next few weeks to explain the issue to you and why we have taken the position we have.
The first issue is the grade standards for soft fruit. As you may be aware a number of post-harvest facilities handled their SunGold fruit later than its optimum and it was soft at harvest. There are a number of underlying reasons for this including factors like the grade standards themselves, capacity, the calling of the harvest including chasing early start or the decision to working public holidays or not. There are facilities that have a disproportionate level of softs in the inventory and a softer fruit profile than others. There are also CA operators who will now be able to pack to the trial standard These facilities have lobbied Zespri to continue the trial this season, whereby softer fruit will be accepted at the wharf (up to 10% softs), with the idea that this fruit will be no worse in market than if it had been reworked here onshore. The volume in the trial is “unlimited” and the costs will not fully be sheeted home to where they lay. This trial is proceeding even though Seeka voted against it. Seeka and Seeka Growers took issue with this “trial” coming mid-season. If the proposal had been discussed pre-season then we might have been able to live with it, noting that one of the protagonists for the trial was advocating not harvesting SunGold fruit under 6kgs pressure at that time. The risk of the trial is that it will result in higher offshore fruit loss and handling costs that will be paid by the national pool rather than those who created the loss, and the loss rates will not be shown in domestic fruit loss but lost in the offshore fruit loss figures. It is also seemingly ok for facilities to participate in the trial who are on hold as they can’t get their fruit in grade.
Costs and losses should fall where they naturally lay. There is no reason why our supplying growers should cover the costs of facilities who can’t get their growers into grade. Seeka Growers were firm on this. In spite of our line of logic, only Seeka voted against the proposal but in this dialogue I have explained to you why we voted the way we did.
Sad news to report
On Tuesday 29 June, Shally Haynes, our Quality Manager at Seeka Peninsula suffered a medical event. The team responded incredibly quickly and revived her with the defibrillator, and she was helivaced to Auckland where sadly she passed away. This has been an incredibly testing time for all and we have moved to support our people and the family. Our condolences to all.
To the numbers:
OPAC
Seeka
Thank you all.
Kind regards
Michael
Seeka Key
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