It is a great feeling, whatever the crop has delivered, when your fruit is picked, packed and even a little bit exported. The apples and kiwifruit harvest are complete for another year and as normal, there were surprises. Apples down 11% on volume with Gabrielle delivering a 2024 season sting in its tail for Hawkes Bay while the South suffered the dry. Kiwifruit volumes were significantly up as growers loaded up their crops following lower volumes from the 2023 frost effected season. What was consistent across the apple and kiwifruit harvest were the consecutive dry days. Bay of Plenty had an unprecedented twenty-nine consecutive packing days for March/April period.
With resource plans pre-set everyone of course must remain nimble enough to face the seasonal challenges. And while there were less than last year, there were still plenty to keep our attention. The harder and faster start in most areas, some raw material constraints, and higher volumes up north plus a couple of serious health concerns among our front-line Technicians. Our global team adjusted quickly from UK, USA, Chile to NZ, from production, customer service to the field, to meet the challenges. It is a great feeling to pull this together, to bring together the resources required to meet new challenges and deliver a result of which you are proud.
Sinclair continues to make positive progress towards a single, high performing, home compostable label. There are too many compostable variants available today, it is confusing and costly to manage for you and as an industry. One compostable label to meet all needs remains our number one goal, our focus. We will have more information on this August 2024.
Thank you for your continued support. We do hope you get time to reflect on you and your team’s significant effort to get to this point so you can enjoy this destination before embarking on the next one.