Frankly Speaking Week 14 Update
Seeka has continued to have a successful harvest season for 2016. There have been no significant safety issues to report and the sheds have settled well into their work. Seeka is ahead of its market share in G3 SunGold but while we are off the pace with hayward – the maturity and harvest is much later than had been expected by Zespri. The table below shows year on year volumes by variety and the hayward [Green] is behind last year by some 9.5m trays. This has meant that some shipping opportunity as been lost to the Industry and can only be made up at the end of the season.
Seeka has continued to revise and refine its capacity plan and believes it has the capacity to pack its fruit in a timely fashion and has capacity to coolstore. This of course has been helped by being ahead of the share in G3 SunGold.
Pocket Pack Issue
You may have read the reports about contaminated Plix [Pocket Pack]. One of the suppliers of Plix to the Industry has had an issue with contaminated product. Some of the product sourced from China was contaminated with a grease deposit at the time of manufacture. It is an intermittent fault affecting plix randomly at the rate of between 1:8,000 and 1:10,000.
While Seeka is one of the companies supplied by the distributor [UPNZ] Seeka believes it doesn’t have any contaminated plix with fruit in it. And in fact no contaminated trays have been found with fruit in them to date. Our normal process at tray prep is to check every plix as it is put into the tray with the poly-liner, before the fruit is put into the tray. As we often recycle packaging, it is checked and any dirty or damaged packaging or plix is removed. Once Seeka became aware of the issue, additional people were put on the machines to check the plix, as we have now checked our entire plix stock.
In order to assure the quality of the product – Seeka has developed non-invasive testing technology that can see the fruit and the plix thus enabling checking for contamination without removing the fruit from the plix. Accordingly all affected packed fruit will be checked and we don’t expect any loss or additional cost as a result.
Happy and safe harvesting!
Michael
