Startling innovation

Marketing Manager Sam Temperton packing avocados

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. 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.

A perfect product Thorley Robbins, Owner Facial care and beauty products range

As it turns out, most of the people making the orders are women. Customers buy subscriptions and billing is made simple by a regular direct payment from the customer’s bank account. Customers can order boxes of fruit as they like – one-offs, one box a fortnight, three-weekly or monthly, through the company’s website. Thorley dislikes bureaucracies and The Avo Tree’s business model is designed to make the harvesting, ordering and payment processes as simple as possible for growers and consumers. The western Bay of Plenty region has a mild maritime climate ideally suited to horticulture. Over the years many people have bought land around Tauranga as lifestyle blocks and planted small orchards for personal consumption and hoping to turn a few bucks selling from roadside stalls.

These outfits are often too small to attract the attention of the big packhouses geared up to supply the supermarket chains, and the fruit not suitable for the export market. The Avo Tree takes the product of about 60 smaller growers. First up, growers don’t have to wait for months to get paid, Thorley Robbins and marketing manager Sam Temperton will visit a small block, some of which may only have a dozen trees, assess the crop for size and quantity, pick it themselves and pay the grower on the spot – which may be $2,000 to $3,000 a week until the fruit runs out. “We pick most of the fruit ourselves. We might pick 10 bins in a weekend,” Thorley explains. The avocado season stretches from August to March. The most popular variety is Hass, which accounts for about 95% of the crop. The remainder is made up of the Reed variety, which helps to bridge the late autumn season. The Avo Tree has a commitment to sustainability. The fruit is packed in untreated pinewood wool, the boxes are compostable and held together with similarly biodegradable gum-paper tape. At Te Puna there’s an ‘upstairs’ – a mezzanine floor built into the old packhouse where visitors are introduced to The Avo Tree’s new ideas in product development. First is a recently launched range of six avocado-based skincare products, face creams and moisturisers, and potentially soaps to be added. The initiative is under development and requires volume and investment, he says. Viarni Bright was employed as brand manager in 2018.

Another idea is a range of avocado leaf teas which come in three blends: lemongrass and ginger as a digestive tea, an immunity tea blended with cinnamon and tulsi (holy basil) and a calming tea infused with chamomile. “Avocado leaf has a slightly aniseed flavour. We had it tested and worked with a food scientist in the United States. Avocado leaf is very high in quercetin, a common plant flavonoid and anti-inflammatory. Once we realised there was a reason to produce (avocado leaf teas) we worked with the guys who make the blends that have digestive, immunity-enhancing and calming effects.”

Avocado leaf has a slightly aniseed flavour. We had it tested and worked with a food scientist in the United States.

The Avo Tree collaborated with Wellington-based Parrotdog brewery to produce an avocado leaf flavoured beer.

“They brewed it. We wanted to attach the brand to it as we knew it would help us with a bit of PR. It was only available in cans and only a small run through the craft beer scene, but people enjoyed it.” They’ve even given miniature avocado trees as pot plants a go in ‘Avo vases’ – decorative non-fruiting specimens. “It’s a lot for a small team to do on a shoestring. In the long run we would like to export. It’s a smarter way to sell New Zealand avocados. It’s a step towards ‘brand New Zealand’ avocados, a means to a higher-value product,” Thorley says.