YOUR INDUSTRY
Marketing Manager Sam Temperton packing avocados
Startling innovation
AVOCADO FEATURE
Down the end of a Te Puna Road driveway near Tauranga, boxed in by a shelterbelt and a kiwifruit orchard, there’s a small miracle in marketing going on with avocados. Words by Geoff Lewis : Photographs by Trefor Ward While kiwifruit is king in Bay of Plenty horticulture, the avocado is the rising power, and the expanding team behind The Avo Tree have developed a streamlined system for harvesting and marketing the fruit all over New Zealand, improved returns for small growers, and have branched out into a list of value-added products. Business owner Thorley Robbins has always lived rurally and grew up in horticulture on his parents’ kiwifruit orchard at Katikati. At age 15 he grew strawberries for market. He went on to do a four-year degree in industrial design at Massey before skipping the ditch to work in his chosen profession in Australia. But home is home, and there are economies to be found hanging with the olds, so he returned to the Bay and decided to set up a business picking, packing and home-delivering avocados.
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The ORCHARDIST : MARCH 2021
He leased a former kiwifruit packing shed and grading machine which he set about modifying to sort out different sizes of avocados. “I spent my last $7,000 getting a website designed and a Facebook post – then I discovered I’d sold more fruit than I had.” Today, The Avo Tree will pack and courier boxes of fresh avocados to anywhere with a postal address in New Zealand, from Bluff to Northland and even the Chatham Islands. About 95% goes to private consumers, with the remainder heading out to cafés and restaurants. An ordinary week can see between 2,500 and 3,000 boxes out the door each containing an average of 14 avocados. Just before Christmas The Avo Tree team packed and sent 50,000 fruit in a week. In the 2019–2020 year it harvested, boxed and delivered more than a million avocados nationwide.
