Frankly Speaking

FRANKLY SPEAKING - WEEK 5

Welcome to our first 2018 update

In commencing the weekly blog, we would start by wishing you every success this year, and a safe and optimal harvest. Our aim is to deliver you a timely and professional service with competitive results and returns.

Our team has remained very busy through-out January. The avocado harvest continued as we delivered fruit throughout the Christmas and New Year period to key customers. Operationally we achieved 100% supply to our key Australian retail customer through the festive holiday period. We expect to complete packing this week, and at last count had exported 195,000 class 1 trays and are forecasting a return on average $39.50 per export tray and local market $20 per tray. Early fruit will receive a little less, and later fruit a little more, but really the returns are excellent and our growers will again be amongst the higher earning growers in the Industry. The opening of the China market for the 2018 harvest provides a good alternate to our key Australian market, and we have yet to understand pricing or discuss market allocations with our Avocado grower council, AvoFresh.

The team is focusing on the kiwiberry harvest. Crop estimates have been reviewed and initial maturity results showing that we are close to harvest, with some suggestion that we could be harvesting late this week which would be around 7 to 10 days ahead of last year. Seeka has invested in a new machine, a cherry grader with optical grading capability with high capacity punneting. The machine can pack 100 punnets a minute with fruit fully processed and stored without leaving the coolstore. The machine is currently in commissioning at the KCG packhouse part of the Delicious Nutritious Food Company.

For Kiwifruit there remains an outstanding Supplier Accountability issue from the 2017 Hayward season that is being discussed by the industry. At the end of last year concerns were raised that the quality results from Zeebrugge were inconsistent with the quality results from Southern Europe. The solution which has been proposed is a retrospective change to the quality calculation which will reallocate $4m across the Hayward conventional pool. We have long held the view that the quality system doesn’t work properly, and doesn’t sheet the cost of quality or the benefits of it back to those suppliers or growers who deliver either the cost or the benefit, but we have lived with the system forever hopeful that we might remedy the issues next year.

The 2018 kiwifruit monitor programme is underway. While it is early with only a few monitor results the trends we would note are:

SunGold
• Fruit is bigger than 2017 and the dry matter slightly lower [noting it is early]
• Fruit numbers are good. The yields and size are likely to deliver a larger crop volume than expected prior to Christmas

Hayward
• Size is much larger than at the same stage last year – perhaps as much as 10 grams on average, the next monitor result will be interesting to see.
• Fruit numbers are good and our crop estimates are increasing.

It is still very early in the monitoring process. There are good markets for class 2 fruit, noting that class 2 is not a reject.  As the Green14 growers are aware Zespri announced last year that it is not selling the class 2 G14 Sweetgreen.

Grower events coming up

Australia Trip

We have had an excellent response to our 2018 Australian Grower Tour which is being held from 27th February through to the 2nd March.

After 5pm Grower Roadshows

We look forward to seeing you at the March roadshow, we understand it is a busy time of year but appreciate being able to catch up with as many of you as possible. Invitations advising timing and venue will be emailed to you next week.

Regards

Michael