Michael Franks

You can eat it with the skin on or off.

It's grown here in New Zealand to very safe standards.

It's nearly organic.

The few chemical sprays that we apply

sort of don't have any significant consequence to anyone.

And so the clean, green, nutritious product that we're producing, you know, people want it the world around and it's a phenomena, it really is.

So we're the second largest post-harvest company.

We're the largest grower.

And while we've got a single desk in Zespri that coordinates all of the marketing, the next layers down are competitive.

And that's actually quite an efficient model for growers because if we're competitive, we're looking for ways to innovate, to take costs out, to automate.

to be faster, better, smarter, and deliver better quality product to the market.

So we are the second largest behind a co-op.

We've got about 20% market share in the kiwi fruit sector.

Yes, I mean, our goal was to have an array of highly automated and efficient products

machines close to where the fruit's grown, and across all of the major growing regions.

We want to hire New Zealanders, but the volume that we're handling over time is going to go up.

And labour's expensive, and sometimes doesn't want to turn up.

And so the alternate to that is for us to automate.

And so we are automating, we are innovating.

We have brought some new technology to the industry this year to remove labour and to make us faster, better, smarter.