Jen's Pick: Biggest season ever for avocado industry

Seven million trays of avocados were grown, harvested, packed, exported and marketed this season.

Understanding the pressures on the Auckland transport system is pretty easy when you decide, as I did, to drive from Tauranga through Auckland to Warkworth on a rainy weekday.

I was heading to meet Hamish Alexander, owner of Southern Paprika, who with his Dutch partners are investing in nearly 200ha of avocados west of Warkworth, in Tapora.

Ten minutes onto the motorway and we slowed to 10km/h, a speed which was reasonably constant for the next hour.

There are very few advantages of driving at 10km/h on a motorway you anticipate driving at 100km/h except that in this instance I was scheduled to join a conference call on biosecurity, and found in fact that the hour passed very well, driving at 10km/h and participating in a call (hands-free of course) was easy and safe; thank goodness I was able to be otherwise occupied rather than stressing as I sat at the wheel during what to me would be an unacceptable daily grind.

We are hearing a lot about the new developments and the growth in the avocado category globally, the increasing demand, the almost daily new good news about the health aspects of avocados are all pointing to a long term opportunity in avocados.

New Zealand only supplies about 1.5 per cent of world avocado supply, versus Mexico with 55 per cent, so the potential 20-30 per cent increase in planted hectares across NZ isn't making a difference to global supply.

As an industry we are successfully coming to the end of our biggest season ever, and are very happy to suggest the 7 million trays grown, harvested, packed, exported and marketed by the industry has been done very well.

Results won't be out for another month or so, but early indications are that our export marketers managed high volumes and received high prices, something that is normally very difficult to achieve.

In the NZ market, we saw volumes reach over 60,000 trays per week - and I recall clearly four years ago, being told the NZ market could only manage 35,000 trays a week, without crashing the market.

So we are experiencing the increase in demand for avocados, we are fuelling that with active promotional campaigns here and in our export markets and will continue to do that going forward.

Additional supply of avocados from NZ, provided it continues to be managed professionally, through industry agreed systems, poses opportunity not concern.

Here at NZ Avocado we have been engaging with a specialist agency to help us refine our social media strategy.

Bevan, Anna and Jodi are our experts but the landscape is changing so quickly even they need to constantly learn what's new and what's working differently than it might have the previous month or year.

We use social media to engage with consumers and we've seen great growth this season, more than doubling our follower numbers to over 45,000 across New Zealand and Asia.

If you don't already follow us on Facebook, join our NZ Avocado page!

We are also planning grower meetings for March - with a new/potential grower information evening on Wednesday, March 8 - a repeat of the inaugural "new growers" meeting last year which attracted over 70 people - probably half growers who had already bought orchards and half interested in buying an orchard.

We gave an overview of the industry and systems requirements and then asked a couple of growers to talk about their experiences.

It was a great recipe - and we received very strong feedback that we should repeat that format, which we will do next week at our offices.

We are also running a series of grower meetings starting in Houhora yesterday and running through to a Katikati roadshow Tuesday, March 7 and Te Puke roadshow on March 9.

These are open to all growers and others by invitation.

We're planning the new season's activities and are keen to share that with growers and seek their feedback on the activities we plan to undertake.

As I said earlier, it's about the whole industry being involved; stakeholders knowing what's being planned, having the opportunity to participate in decisions and being part of the implementation of those plans.

To me real engagement is an essential part of the success of our industry.

I hope to see good turnouts at our upcoming grower meetings.