On one such morning—a Sunday, not long after dawn—I pull off State Highway 2 and clamber up a small hill to look down on Te Puke. You’d expect complete tranquillity at this time of day on a winter weekend, but this is kiwifruit country and it’s the business end of the season.
The dawn chorus is competing with the buzz of trucks and cars heading for the kiwifruit cool stores and packing sheds that dot the region. The warning beepers of the forklifts and reversing trucks float up through the still air, repeating like giant outdoor alarm clocks. Every now and then the rattle and thud of a gigantic steel door closing rolls up the valley.
The middle of June is a critical period between the fruit achieving full, plump maturity and the likely arrival of potentially disastrous winter frosts. Since mid-April a small army of hired hands has been plucking kiwifruit from the head-high vines and filling giant wooden transporter bins that can hold as much as 300 kg of fruit.
The packing sheds and cool stores are idle most of the year save for the storage of a little cheese and meat, but at this point in the season they become the crucial conduit between the kiwifruit orchards and lucrative markets all over the world. For five or six weeks they host a tense round-the-clock race against time. In the western Bay of Plenty alone there are more than 30, and from a distance one looks much like another. They can be hard to spot from the road as they’re usually nestled among the orchards, which are in turn hidden from view by the ubiquitous shelterbelts of Matsudana willow and Japanese cedar.
The Transpack packing shed and cool store, however—among the Bay of Plenty’s largest and most advanced—are easy to find. Just head for the region’s best-known landmark—a bright-green four-storey-high kiwifruit slice beside the road that marks the entrance to the Kiwifruit Country tourist park. Transpack is nearby.
Transpack belongs to Seeka Kiwifruit Industries, one of the biggest post-harvest operators in the business. “Packing shed”—or “packhouse”, to use the more common term—is really shorthand for what is in fact an operations base, responsible for everything from establishing and managing orchards to loading fruit onto ships in Tauranga.
SEEKA’S IAN GREAVES is keeping an anxious eye on the whole process. He’s a wiry and enthusiastic man who appears to love the logistical challenge. Just as well—this season’s huge harvest has put the system under pressure. A week earlier, Seeka’s staff paused briefly to celebrate packing its 10 millionth tray in a season—a record for the company and the industry. But the fruit is still coming through and the clock is still ticking.
Transporter bins full of fresh kiwifruit are carefully stacked four and five deep under high-roofed outdoor shelters for the fruit to “cure” before being graded and packed.
“We’ve had so much fruit this season that we’ve run out of canopy space and we’re using temporary marquees,” says Greaves. “Next year we’ll have to build more canopies.”
Processing can’t be rushed. Each fruit arrives with a wound where it’s been plucked from the vine. If it isn’t allowed to dry out first in the open air, it could rot in storage or on the long trip to supermarkets overseas.
In accordance with the industry’s tracking system, each bin is bar-coded so any bad or irregular fruit can be traced back to the particular orchard in which it matured. Bins are gently emptied onto conveyer-belts that sweep the fruit into the shed, where they are assessed for blemish, sorted by size and transported to a packing station.