The hayward “first-past-the-post” period closed at midnight Tuesday 26 April. While the numbers in the tables below are at Sunday 24th, Seeka packed 4.646M trays under the “first-past-the-post” race representing 32.6% of the industry – much higher than our market share. It has been a good harvest campaign to date. We appreciate the efforts of our growers and picking contractors who made fruit available on ANZAC day and picked. We had our sheds open and that fruit enabled us to push on and get more of the fruit into store. Both the company and all Seeka Growers benefit from the guaranteed throughput in this period. This fruit will be shipped shortly meaning that we have more capacity available for our mainpack growers.
Personally, while I am grateful of the effort of our people and contractors, I remain firmly of the opinion that this early structuring of the season delivers an unacceptably unhealthy and unsafe work environment – and yet again we have been lucky to get through this period without a significant event. This early part of the season must be reorganised to deliver a safer work environment.
Dry matter in hayward fruit remains a concern. Our latest information suggests that 6% of our fruit may not make the minimum threshold of 15.5 in a timely fashion. This percentage is much lower should the threshold revert to last year’s level of 14.5. The Industry is now undergoing a monitoring programme, whereby 30% of orchards will be tested to assess the level of the issue. Because Seeka has already done this work, tested every orchard and made the results available to Zespri – our supplying orchards won’t need to be included in the testing. Our technical team will shortly produce an update on what the monitor round showed us, plus some ideas about how to get late dry matter up other than just waiting and hoping.
We have the week 18 allocation in place for hayward of 565k trays, and are chasing early mainpack brixes of 6.2.
Our focus now is very much on G3 and moving into and through the G3 harvest. Sheds are full, crops are lined up and our teams now into the standard production cycle.
To the numbers [as at midnight 24 April]
Pocket Pack Issue
We have now checked a third of our inventory which remains on hold as a result of being packed with the pocket packs suspected of having grease contamination. The checking process has found a very small number of pocket packs that have fluoresced when checked. This and the unchecked product remains on hold until Zespri advises whether this fruit is able to be exported, and we expect advise on this later tonight.
Annual shareholder meeting
A number of growers and shareholders took time out yesterday, at a busy time of year, to join us at the annual shareholders meeting. Thank you to those of you who came along we appreciate your support and enjoyed the opportunity to catch up with you.
Happy and safe harvesting!
Michael
Seeka Key
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