Quarry Rd production supervisor Vishal Virk, general manager operations, Phil Karl, Quarry Rd site manager Alan Davidson, CEO Hamish Simson and Te Puke growers Fleur and Seth Pardoe who grew the fruit for the 50 millionth tray.
Quarry Rd production supervisor Vishal Virk, general manager operations, Phil Karl, Quarry Rd site manager Alan Davidson, CEO Hamish Simson and Te Puke growers Fleur and Seth Pardoe who grew the fruit for the 50 millionth tray.
Post-harvest operator EastPack has become the first in New Zealand to pack 50 million trays of kiwifruit in a season.
The milestone was reached last week.
“It felt like a mountain in theory, but it wasn’t a mountain in practice, which is kind of nice,” chief executive Hamish Simson says.
The landmark tray was packed at the fully automated grader 3 at EastPack’s Quarry Rd plant in Te Puke with fruit grown by Seth and Fleur Pardoe with the assistance of Prospa Orchard Management.
Celebrations were held across EastPack’s six plants.
“The celebration is also a thank you to the staff for what they’ve done,” Hamish says.
“We talk about shiny machinery, but in the end, it’s a team that’s actually delivered that sort of result. They have been having celebratory lunches and tea shouts because, in the end, it’s the people sitting around those tables, it’s their hard work that’s produced.
He also gave a shout-out to growers “because we couldn’t have done it without their support”.
“They’ve produced a good crop this year and it’s been a joy to handle because it’s been good quality.
EastPack CEO Hamish Simson
“You always try and do your best whether the fruit’s strong or not, but when you are dealing with really clean lines, your graders run fast, everything runs well and life is good and it’s been one of those years, after the last two or three years when there’s always been some sort of cloud on the horizon.”
The fruit for the 50 millionth tray came out of Quarry Rd’s controlled atmosphere (CA) store.
The store employs the latest technology to preserve fruit in a controlled atmosphere. Once picked, it remains in the bins, rather than being packed then put into cool storage, and is put into the CA store.
The CA store is air-tight and one of the controls is a significant reduction in oxygen.
“Kiwifruit “breathe”, a bit like a human, taking in oxygen and giving out carbon dioxide,” says Hamish. “We restrict the amount of oxygen and that restricts what they can use and what it does is it effectively puts the fruit to sleep.”
The fruit currently being packed was put into the CA store in May.
“It extends the packing season and that is a benefit for two reasons - the graders can run for a longer without having to build new graders, which means you can give people more work and the grower gets a benefit in that the fruit has really good storage potential.
“There’s a win-win all round but it doesn’t come without spending a fair amount of money putting it in.”
The remaining fruit will be packed before the end of the month and should bring the total crop volume for 2024 up to 50.8m trays.
Since 2018 EastPack has invested over $250m in infrastructure to support growth to continue to provide EastPack customers with a high level of service.
“Research and development is a big part of our journey and we are especially proud of the advancements we have made in CA technology and automation,” Hamish says.
“By next season two more sites will have fully automated graders and our total daily packing capacity will exceed 10,000 bins a day.
“We will also complete development of 1 million trays of CA capacity at our Washer Rd site, meaning all sites now have CA capability which allows us to harvest another 10,000 bins per day on top of the fruit being harvested for conventional packing.
“This essentially gives us 20,000 bins of daily harvest capacity when our growers need it the most.”
