Michael Franks

It's a site with two of our 17 machines that we've got in the fleet.

All organic fruit that we handle is packed here.

It's a very unique site.

The land under which we are sitting at the moment is not owned by us.

It is leased from a Māori entity, Te Ao Anu Hukapak.

for 99 years, everything above the ground and all the improvements are owned by us.

And this site's going to handle somewhere between four to five and a half million trays of fruit this season.

So each tray is 3.6 kilos.

We will handle at the peak somewhere between 980,000 and a million trays a day of Class 1 product that's been packed and graded into the box.

This season we expect to handle somewhere between 45 and 47 million trays and we handled 47 million trays last year.

Our 11 sites sort of span from Tairawhiti, Gisborne, all the way through to Kerikeri and Taitakura.

And across those sites, while we predominantly handle kiwifruit, we are also handling persimmons, citrus and avocados.

So there's a lot going on.

In terms of scale, today we would have around 3,500 seasonal workers directly employed in addition to our 700 permanents.

We've got a number of parts of the business outside of our core product, which is kiwifruit, including our wholesale marketing operations.

and our Australian business.

Australian business gives us some geographical diversity, takes us into a different region.

It's predominantly Kiwi fruit, but we're also growing European pears, Asian pears, Nashi, Jujubes, and we've got some exciting new varieties that we're trialling over there.

Well, last year was a perfect year for us.

It was a perfect growing season.