New Zealand kiwifruit marketer Zespri is closing its 2022 season with a final charter vessel bound for Asia. The vessel carrying some of the final volumes of this season’s New Zealand kiwifruit crop departed the Port of Tauranga, bound for Tokyo and Kobe in Japan.

The charter reefer vessel MV Kowhai is carrying around 158 tonnes of Zespri SunGold Kiwifruit and 2,231 tonnes of Zespri Green Kiwifruit.

In total, Zespri has sent four charter vessels to Northern Europe, eight to the Mediterranean, four to North America’s West Coast and forty-one to Asia. This is, along with almost 17,000 refrigerated containers to ship more than 160 million trays of New Zealand-grown Zespri Kiwifruit this season.

“We’ve faced significant shipping congestion and container shortages at a number of international ports, and we’ve been fortunate that our longstanding partnerships and charter vessels have allowed us to avoid much of this congestion,” said Zespri’s Chief Global Supply Officer Alastair Hulbert.

Hulbert also said that a new Port service in China, along with a new direct shipping route to North America, were critical operational changes that Zespri implemented this year to secure shipments to these destination markets.

With the final volumes of the New Zealand kiwifruit crop set to depart over the coming weeks, the executive said that Zespri is transitioning to fruit from its Northern Hemisphere partners in Italy, France, Greece, Korea and Japan.

The vessel is expected to reach Tokyo by the end of November, with the season’s final container shipments scheduled to conclude over the coming weeks.