A tasty plan to create thousands of new jobs

Tony Nowell (left) and Colin Mitten at Manukau's coming food centre. Photo / Steven McNicholl

Just behind the shiny new park-and-ride facility on the way to Auckland Airport, a more modest building is taking shape that symbolises plans to create jobs.

The $8 million Manukau Food Innovation Centre, due to open on September 1, will give food manufacturers a facility to produce trial commercial runs of new products at a cost of tens of thousands of dollars, rather than millions.

Its backers believe the processed food industry, which employs about 12,000 people across Auckland, has the capacity to grow to 2 times its present size nationally to match comparable countries such as Denmark.

"It's really about taking the commodities that New Zealand has done so well to date and adding more value to those," said ex-Zespri chief executive Tony Nowell, who heads the Auckland Council subsidiary that will run the centre.

The council discussion document on the new Auckland Plan lists similar initiatives across industries such as boatbuilding and health technology aimed at developing an "internationally connected innovation system" to drive the region's economic growth.

Three years after the global financial crisis hit, Auckland still has the country's second-highest unemployment rate, 7.9 per cent, with 104,000 working-aged Aucklanders on welfare benefits at the end of March.

British author Charles Landry's book The Creative City stands next to Super City economic development manager Harvey Brookes' computer, inspiring a plan for economic, social and spatial development.

"The two big focuses in the economic development strategy are first, skills, education and learning, and second, the innovation system," Mr Brookes said.

"The skill level of the people moving into the workforce is not high enough for the jobs that we have. This is a 10- to 25-year exercise to get these things right.

"And the education system is not connected into a coherent system that creates innovation across universities, Crown research institutes, technical institutes, schools, small and medium businesses and so on," he said.

"We are saying these are the critical points. If we are going to take a leadership role, who needs to be doing something on this?"

The former Manukau City Council agreed last year to pay $500,000 a year for five years towards running the food innovation centre - a commitment taken over by the Auckland Council.

Central Government is chipping in $8 million for the building and equipment - 140 different machines, some of them the only ones of their kind in the country - plus $1.4 million towards running costs, as part of a broader $21 million project that will include smaller centres at Ruakura (Hamilton), Massey University (Palmerston North) and in Canterbury.

The centre is due to be fully self-funding from the fees paid by food companies by 2014.

Ross MacKenzie of Penrose-based Hansells Food Group said his company would use the centre to try out several "blue sky" projects.

"There are some bits of equipment that we don't have," he said. "There are some products we envisage for which we don't have the equipment to test and develop them."

Hansells will open a bakery on its Penrose site next month and plans to increase its staff from 250 to 280 over the next year, with two-thirds of its products going across the Tasman to Australia.

In the marine industry, the council has inherited from Waitakere a similar collaborative project for a yacht-lifting facility at Hobsonville.

Mr Brookes said Auckland built only 3 per cent of the world's megayachts and needed facilities and workforce training to gain a bigger share of the market.

The Counties-Manukau District Health Board is driving another project for a "health innovation hub" based around Middlemore Hospital and surrounding firms such as Fisher & Paykel Healthcare, now one of the region's biggest employers.

F&P Healthcare chief executive Mike Daniell said the company had typically doubled in size every five years and saw the opportunity to keep doing that over the next decade or so, with a $95 million research and clinical development centre due to open late next year on its Highbrook site.

But he said manufacturing was expanding faster at the company's factory in Mexico while the kiwi dollar was at its current high against the US dollar.

"We are hiring, but at a much lower rate than in the past," he said.

Animal health business Bomac Laboratories plans to increase staffing from about 200 to 250 over the next two years after its new owner, Bayer, decided to centralise all its Southern Hemisphere veterinary research and development at Bomac's Manukau site.

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