Zespri’s grower alliance manager David Courtney said Green fruit size this season is 2.5 sizes smaller than usual and SunGold two sizes down on usual with the long, dry, ripening period scaling fruit down but pushing up drymatter levels to create exceptionally well flavoured fruit.
“We have had one grower who has been growing kiwifruit for 40 years who said he has never reported better drymatter levels in his crop.”
Zespri chief executive Dan Mathieson said the market has become conditioned to larger fruit.
“So our focus has to be on making sure consumers are seeing value in the smaller fruit.”
So far this appears to be the case with 36 million trays harvested and shipped, up on 30m at the same time in June last year.
“We are experiencing strong repeat purchases and an increase in stock run rates, outstripping our crop supply at the moment.”
This year’s crop comes on the back of last year’s record breaking 140m tray crop and this year is expected to have about 140m trays, split almost evenly for the first time between SunGold and Green fruit.
Mathieson said past investment in markets is paying dividends with some welcome surges in markets including Japan and Spain.
Japan has proved to be a superstar growth market with strong consumer demand resulting in 26m trays of Green and SunGold sold. The increase has come in a market where demand for fruit in general has declined by 10% in the past decade.
Mathieson said Zespri now has three 20m-plus tray markets with Japan, China at 27m, and now Spain, 20m.
“Spain’s consumers like fruit and have a strong interest in health and nutrition.”
Zespri’s total operating revenue for the financial year was $2.9 billion and the marketer is on track to exceed $3b this year.
The 2025 $4.5b target is quite attainable, Mathieson said.
SunGold licence fees are proving to be a valuable income stream for the marketer, with the latest 700ha of licences touching $290,000 a hectare this season.
Courtney said Zespri has wrestled with options for selling the licences but leaving it to the market and to growers to make their own calculations on risk and return still appears the best option.
Meantime, the much promised Red variety has made a small scale appearance on retail shelves but Zespri is continuing to collect data on its shelf stability with about 30,000 trays sold in NZ last season.
Tens of thousands of trays, rather than hundreds of thousands, are likely to be the volumes for this season.
Courtney said it is uncertain how licensing options will play out for that variety.
He is confident the Red variety will find its own niche with consumers and grow overall sales rather than diminish sales from SunGold or Green.
“If you look back to 1992 we had 50m Green trays and last season we had 70m SunGold, 60m Green sales so the demand has grown with the fruit.”
