Zespri gets staff on deck

Gerry Wright (left) and Stuart Ede from Zespri are conditioning technicians travelling on ships to oversee the ripening of kiwifruit. Photo / John Borren

Fancy babysitting 5000 tonnes of kiwifruit on a sea voyage to Europe or Asia for up to one month and ripening the cargo en route? It's no cruise-ship role but the positions were "highly sought after", Zespri says.

Technical manager Frank Bollen said its fruit-conditioning programme, which aimed to get premium kiwifruit to the market as quickly as possible, was a popular venture with no shortage of candidates.

One fruit-monitoring technician would accompany about 1.2 million trays of kiwifruit on the first shipments overseas, ensuring fruit would be ready for retail by the time it reached its destination. The method of ripening fruit on board with ethylene - a gas that kiwifruit naturally produced - had been utilised by Zespri for 15 years and took advantage of the timeframes spent at sea.

It's nowhere like a cruise ship. They haven't got time to entertain you.

"Essentially you are tricking the fruit into ripening early by warming it up and cooling it down."

This season up to 26 ships were expected to depart with a technician to take advantage of the front-end of the harvest before fruit would eventually begin to ripen on its own without assistance, Mr Bollen said.

"In the past you got stuck with hard kiwifruit that had to be ripened in the market and caused big delays. The cool thing about kiwifruit is it can be picked a little bit immature and ripened early.

"It's critical to get good fruit to those first markets that tastes fantastic."

Technicians were trained at the beginning of the season and were allocated a ship each. Fruit was regularly measured and tested for firmness and sugar levels, with that data analysed in Tauranga.

"They are our eyes and ears on the ship in terms of what is going on. We analyse all the data and make the ripening decisions and then we email them and say it's the right time to turn the temperature down. The ships have very powerful cooling systems and massive grunty fans."

Finding people to accompany the kiwifruit was not a problem.

"It's a highly sought-after job and some technicians love it and have done it for years. Some make fantastic friends with the crew on the ship and they will come back and meet them later and host them around the Bay of Plenty."

Wharf technician Gerry Wright said it was hard work and those doing it had to be comfortable with their own company because there were only 20 people on the ship and they were all busy.

It was also likely English would be their second language.

"It's nowhere like a cruise ship. They haven't got time to entertain you."

Potential technicians did not necessarily need to have a kiwifruit background but it could be helpful, he said.

"It's about using your initiative at sea, getting the job done and sending back regular reports on time."

Zespri's first shipment left the Port of Tauranga last month for Japan. It had chartered 55 refrigerated ships - including five ships direct to Shanghai - and 8000 refrigerated containers to carry the 2015 Zespri harvest to 54 countries around the world.

It forecast a harvest of about 30 million trays of gold kiwifruit, surpassing the previous high of 29 million trays sold in the 2011 season and nearly double the 18 million trays harvested last season.