The last of the 67 refrigerated charter ships for the New Zealand kiwifruit season left the Port of Tauranga yesterday evening, marking the end of a record-breaking campaign. 

The Asian Lily, last of Zespri’s 67 charter vessels of the season, leaves the Port of Tauranga this afternoon with 2343 pallets of Zespri kiwifruit destined for the Japanese market. Photo by Jamie Troughton/Dscribe Media

The Asian Lily V27 is leaving for Japan with more than 2,000 pallets of Zespri green kiwifruit headed for the ports of Tokyo and Kobe.

In a release, the company highlighted Zespri SunGold kiwifruit volumes were up 68% from last season to 46 million trays, with vines coming into full production.

Zespri chief operating officer Simon Limmer said every season brought its challenges, and people had worked incredibly hard across the industry to deliver another strong result.

“The industry investment in infrastructure has meant that the increased SunGold volumes have been processed well this season,” Limmer said.

“Zespri’s in-market teams are driving sales for the last few weeks of the NZ sales season and the first sales of our Northern Hemisphere-grown SunGold are underway in Europe, with product on the water to Asia.”

The release added the company also sourced premium quality kiwifruit from Northern Hemisphere orchards to supply the market for the few months of the year when New Zealand-grown fruit was not available.

“We’re on track to more than double sales revenue from nearly NZ$2 billion last season to NZ$4.5 billion by 2025,” Limmer said.

 The forecast volumes for the 2016 New Zealand season are 80 million trays of green, 46 million trays of SunGold and 3.8 million trays of organic green.

Going into the Zespri Global Supply season, the volumes are forecast around 10.5 million trays of Zespri green and six million trays of gold (SunGold and Gold) from Zespri’s Northern Hemisphere supplying orchards.

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