Please accept this update briefing you on our 2019 kiwifruit harvest and industry matters to the end of 16 April. There are lots of tired crews at Seeka as the Industry toils to get the bulk of the SunGold fruit harvested at close to its optimum maturity. Fruit is early and maturity is moving quickly. Seeka has a long line up of SunGold maturity areas to be harvested and are working to get it all into the coolstores. As predicted the brix’s in the fruit are moving and we are conscious that the optimal SunGold brix range is between 10 and 13 and the pressure of the fruit will soften as times goes on. A characteristic of the 2019 SunGold harvest is the colour and pressure variation within lines of fruit (maturity areas) is quite wide in some orchards. This will cause our inventory managers some headaches as they select fruit to store or ship. This variation will no doubt cause some surprises to Zespri as it delivers early maturity fruit to the market that is conditioned in-voyage. On vessel conditioning is risky.
In amongst this, Seeka including Aongatete packed 1.1m trays of Hayward as part of the Zespri allocation, over the past week.
Over Easter, Seeka including Aongatete delivered some 800k trays of kiwifruit to the wharf for shipping. It’s a huge loadout effort and the teams have performed well in getting this fruit dockside on time, in full and in specification. Included in the deliveries were 57k trays of week 11 and 12 SunGold that was harvested at protocol A and has been held in the conditioning program getting the fractile to colour up. There is approximately 38k trays left to go and I am assured it will find its way across the try line.
The Seeka Growers Council raised the supply system including kiwistart with Zespri at their last meeting with a number of experienced Seeka personnel outlining their frustrations. This has been a very challenging harvest not helped by the timing of decision making and communication process. And as a theme from the corporate, Seeka is unhappy with the resulting safety risk profile adopted across the Company and no-doubt Industry as it chases artificial deadlines. The Seeka Grower Council has suggested that an FOB system would be fairer, would lead to efficiency and better quality fruit in the market. It’s a vexed problem as naturally a grower used to a certain income stream worries about how it might affect them individually. The reality is that sophisticated Grower Entities, like Seeka Growers and no doubt others in the Industry, can work with their growers to develop systems that fairly incentivise and reward growers for the actions they take and the fruit they provide. And of course, the extraordinary Hayward total quality costs of NZD$80m in 2018 leaves some room for improvement right across the Industry.
On a very positive note, the performance of the plastic bins have come into their own. Fruit quality has been excellent with a number of growers entering the 100 tray per bin club – its actually quite a significant efficiency gain.
To the numbers:
SunGold Conventional trays
| Industry packed 37.0m | Seeka 8.0m (21.6%) | |
| Average size | Industry 29.1 | Seeka 28.7 |
| Seeka in store | 4.1m | On order 834k |
SunGold Organic trays
| Industry packed 692k | Seeka 130k (18.7%) | |
| Average size | Industry 29.8 | Seeka 29.07 |
| Seeka in store | 99k | On order 20k |
Hayward Conventional trays
| Industry packed 15.6m | Seeka 4.4m (28.2%) | |
| Average size | Industry 33.0 | Seeka 32.2 |
| Seeka in store | 2.0m | On order 912k |
Hayward Organic trays
| Industry packed 802k | Seeka 207k (25.8%) | |
| Average size | Industry 35.9 | Seeka 34.7 |
| Seeka in store | 180k | On order 75k |
Sweet Green
| Industry packed 355k | Seeka 46k (12.9%) | |
| Average size | Industry 37.4 | Seeka 38.2 |
| Seeka in store | 10.5k | On order nil |
Kind regards and safe harvesting
Michael
Seeka Key
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