Frankly Speaking – Week 23 Update
Please accept this Grower Update to the end of week 23 [Sunday 7 June].
Weather severely disrupted the harvesting operations last week. While our harvest teams did a good job filling up the canopies prior to the rain, our sheds were still left waiting for the weather to clear once this had been packed out. Once our picking crews are back on the ground harvest should be done and dusted after 4 or 5 more picking days – and that will be a job well done. In spite of the rain, last week Seeka packed just under 1.5M trays of Hayward, put the final 77k trays into CA and packed 82k trays of Hayward Organic.
Hayward yields are incredible. Our average yield is now anticipated to be over 11,200 trays per hectare for Hayward conventional and over 7,700 for Hayward organic representing an increase over last year of 20% and 27% respectively. These are remarkable yields given they are averages over our entire catchment. Yields of over 12,500 trays per hectare for Hayward conventional have not been uncommon in Te Puke. One of the contributors to this result is the large fruit size [HW CK average count size is about 32.4]. Of course this is affecting the inventory and there are already stock builds in larger fruit sizes. Given all the rain, the increased volumes, and the time it will take to sell – it’s going to be an interesting storage year. There is still a long way to run and in many respects the season is only just starting.
Seeka will be at capacity when all the fruit is in and loaded. It’s quite remarkable. At the end of week 23 Seeka had packed a total of 22.8M class 1 trays with another 1.2M in controlled atmosphere storage [so 24M in total]. In perspective last year Seeka packed a total of 20.0M class 1 trays for the full year.
The statistics as at midnight Sunday 7 June 2015:
Hayward
Seeka packed/loaded 17,293,293 trays Industry packed 74,212,086 trays [25.0%]
Seeka average size 32.45 Industry average size 32.33
Shipped 7,879,093 trays In-store 10,691,314 trays
On order for week 24 474,870 trays
On order for week 25 384,670 trays
Our crews packed 1.5M trays of Hayward in week 23 and loaded out 675K trays in spec and on time to the wharf. In addition to the packed volumes, a final 77k trays of CA/BS fruit was loaded to complete that program.
Hayward organic
Seeka packed 978,928 trays Industry packed 3,605,930 trays [27.1%]
Seeka average size 34.78 Industry average size 34.48
Shipped 343,951 trays In-store 633,977 trays
On order for week 24 14,665 trays
On order for week 25 71,673 trays
Organic packing at Huka Pak is continuing. In the home straight now.
G14
Seeka packed 165,181 trays Industry packed 1,365,529 [12.2%]
Seeka average size 36.74 Industry average size 35.92
Shipped 164,837 trays In-store 344 trays
I think that’s us done.
G3 [Sungold]
Seeka packed 3,788,701 trays Industry packed 27,298,572 [14.0%]
Seeka average size 30.41 Industry average size 30.55
Shipped 2,516,745 trays In store 1,271,956 trays
On order for week 24 136,052 trays
On order for week 25 132,326 trays
G3 Organic
Seeka packed 49,730 trays Industry packed 473,415 [10.5%]
Seeka average size 28.95 Industry average size 30.95
Shipped 28,776 trays In store 20,955 trays
On order for week 24 1,792 trays
On order for week 25 2,776 trays
Hort 16a
Seeka packed 404,485 trays Industry packed 4,391,192 trays [9.2%]
Seeka average size 31.41 Industry average size 31.64
Shipped 287,098 trays In store 117,387 trays
On order week 24 31,097 trays
On order week 25 6,327 trays
G9 [Charm]
Seeka packed 87,232 trays Industry packed 760,127 trays [11.4%]
Seeka average size 36.43 Industry average size 34.29
Shipped 41,292 trays In store 45,939 trays
On order week 24 4,864 trays
Shipped 41,292 trays in the week. Nice to see it moving.
Class 2 Programs and SeekaFresh
Our early class 2 programs to Australia have commenced with the retail program scheduled to commence in July. Already there is New Zealand fruit in the wholesale markets in the key cities across Australia and that is unusual at this time of year. Normally fruit wouldn’t arrive until a little later. I had the brief chance to see this last week. Fruit quality is predictably good, but our fruit was alongside locally grown Australian kiwifruit – and that coincidence doesn’t go down well with the local producers. Australia runs a strong programme of buying local where that is possible. Consequently pricing of the New Zealand fruit was a little weak by comparison to the local Australian product.
Australian Supermarket Retailers – a class act
The New Zealand suppliers and industry could learn a lot from the Australian supermarket operators and Seeka has learnt a lot from its relationship and supply line to Woolworths Australia. Woolworths have thousands of suppliers each providing them hundreds of thousands of product lines every year. As we are in the business of supplying imported produce to Australia we must deliver top quality each and every time, it must be in spec, and every part of our supply chain must meet their expectations. The street address for Woolworths is, 1 Woolworths Way, Bella Vista, Sydney - and that’s significant. All details of supply to Woolworths must be the way they want them, from the quality and the supply of the fruit through to matters like invoicing. It’s been our privilege to be part of such a fantastic operation for a long time now, and one which we still appreciate. The standardisation of operations in their business and operation is something we could do well to replicate in our own sphere.
And from the strange but true file
Life can be a little like this at times. On the day that Zespri describing the benefits of their new $14.5M SAP system we electronically received a system generated invoice for $30M. This is the system that largely dogged our supply process particularly in the early stages of the season, and one which I have noted in earlier blogs as causing some frustration in the process of getting fruit to vessels. When I was chuckling about this with one of the other larger post-harvest companies in the Industry – he said he had to hang up and check his in-box to see if he had received the credit !
Close
Teams are pushing onto the home straight. To those of you closer to the organiser – please organise a fine spell of weather to enable us to close out. It has been a long run – even the fire at Oakside on the 4th March that coincided with the start of it all, seems a long, long, time ago.
Kind regards and keep safe till the end
Michael
Seeka Key
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