NZ avocado industry eyes North America, Asia for export growth
Siebert said that in the upcoming 2025-26 season, volumes will need to be redirected to a more diverse marketplace, with many exporters exploring opportunities in North America and Asia.
Siebert said this shift in market focus is likely to result in increased harvest volumes much earlier in the season.
About 50% to 60% of the New Zealand avocado crop is exported, primarily to Australia, with the balance supplied to the domestic market, including local supermarkets.
Siebert said key Asian markets, including South Korea, Japan and Thailand, are also integral to the industry's growth.
'A revised export strategy aims to better align supply with market demand, ensuring higher returns for growers and reducing pressure on the domestic market during peak export periods.'
After some tough recent seasons, Siebert said a dry summer had likely supported a very good-quality season.
'Dry periods can restrict fruit size, so we will have to wait and see if fruit sizes are delayed for the 2025-26 season.'
Picking complete
Siebert said picking was chiefly completed last month, with new season fruit expected in June.
This is predicted to result in a crop of around 6.2 million trays, down from the 7.2 million trays harvested in the previous season.
'Yet with an anticipated improved pack out, estimated export volumes will likely match the highs of last season.'
He said the avocado industry, like all other agriculture sectors, has challenges with extreme weather events.
'Over the last couple of years, there's been a number of cyclones, which downgrade fruit, making it unavailable to meet our export standards.
'These disrupted seasons impact the domestic market, often our second-biggest value and volume market, with an oversupply and reduced returns to growers.'
Advertise with NZME.
Siebert said growers should carry out soil and leaf testing now and make final adjustments to soil nutrients before soil temperatures drop too much.
Phosphonate application to protect from phytophthora (root rot) is important at this time of year, he said.
Pruning is also vital to maintain sunlight on parts of the tree that growers want to be productive.
'Building carbohydrate reserves through winter is critical to support fruit set in spring.'
Environment
Avocado trees enjoy warm, frost-free environments, with temperatures ideally between 12C and 28C.
NZ Avocado represents 1500 growers across the Far North, Mid-North, and Bay of Plenty.
'Most of our 1500-plus growers and orchards are small operations,' Siebert said.
'Only 12% have more than 5ha.
'Although we do have some much larger orchards, there's a very long tail of lifestyle growers with an average orchard size across our industry of about 3.5ha.'
Siebert said around 50% of avocado hectares in production were in the Bay of Plenty, and around 45% in the Northland region. Orchards in the Far North tend to be a bit larger than those elsewhere in the country.
NZ Avocado supports growers by focusing on research, government advocacy, export systems and domestic marketing initiatives.
While the organisation does not sell or market avocados directly, Siebert said it played a crucial role in optimising grower returns and ensuring levy contributions are well-utilised.
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Otago Daily Times
7 hours ago
- Otago Daily Times
School lunch start-up gains a following
Healthy Munch owner Koshila Elengkovan dishes up school lunches from her home kitchen for Invercargill school students and early childhood centre children. PHOTO: NINA TAPU A Southland woman's school lunch start-up is tantalising students' tastebuds in the Deep South. When Koshila Elengkovan, 40, launched her school lunch business Healthy Munch in 2023, she was unsure how Invercargill school students would take to her kai. Two years on, and the one-woman operation has turned many local school students and early childhood centre children into fans of her food. Ms Elengkovan, a former Malaysian national, said working as a kitchenhand at her daughter's daycare centre and at after-school care providers motivated her to start her school lunch business. "I introduced all kinds of Asian foods to the kids, like fried rice and noodles ... and they were really happy to try new stuff," she said. "It was like a massive welcome for the Asian culture ... so that's where it inspired me." The Healthy Munch owner makes and delivers more than 100 school lunches to Invercargill schools and early childhood centres every week. Healthy Munch was born from her desire to see tamariki eating "delicious and nutritious lunches" that "fuelled their growth and wellbeing". Feedback from parents that their children were enjoying her school lunches led to one Invercargill school principal contacting local schools about Healthy Munch. Ms Elengkovan was grateful to former St John's School (Invercargill) principal Nathan Hughes for backing her venture. "Once he tried the food and he got the feedback from the kids ... he sent the letter to all the schools in Invercargill. "Then I got a call from the Otatara principal and everything just went from there." Running the business from her home kitchen while raising her family has kept her busy but seeing "happy kids' faces" enjoying her food has made the challenging work worthwhile. She still could not believe her passion for food and cooking was making a difference to Invercargill school communities, Ms Elengkovan said. "I feel like I will always have a connection with the students through my food." Ms Elengkovan, who has been a primary school teacher, came to Invercargill in 2015.
Techday NZ
04-06-2025
- Techday NZ
How Norby the language robot is more than just a companion
Norby, an AI-powered language companion, highlights the exciting evolution of language learning through interactive and adaptive technology. Adrian Mullan, Founder and CEO of Norby, led the demonstration at Dell Technologies World in Las Vegas, highlighting the robot's ability to engage in natural conversations across multiple languages and contexts. Norby supports more than 30 languages, with new additions and updates rolled out through over-the-air software updates. Mullan said his motivation for developing Norby was rooted in his own experiences. "A few years ago, while helping my daughter with her homework, I noticed something troubling - she was bored and struggling to stay focused. Conventional learning materials simply couldn't hold her attention. That realization sparked the idea for Norby," he explained. Norby is designed to be more than just another digital assistant or educational tool. "Humans have an innate desire to connect, even with the things we create. We give objects human-like traits, attribute emotions to our pets, and name our digital assistants - it's part of who we are," Mullan said. "I didn't want another device that demanded my attention. I wanted a companion - something that helps me stay focused, in flow, and truly engaged. A companion that adapts to my personality, interests, and goals." During the demonstration, Mullan illustrated Norby's capabilities by asking it to greet the audience in various languages and accents, as well as to generate stories on demand. "Hey, Norby, can you do me a favour? Can you say hello to the journalists in the room?" Mullan asked. Norby responded with, "Hello everyone. I'd be happy to extend a greeting to the journalists present. I'm sure, Adrian, you'd like me to make a good impression, so I'll make sure to be as charismatic as possible on various projects, including sound checks and helping with your work on interactive voice companions." The device's multilingual proficiency is underpinned by a flexible architecture that allows Norby to select the best available models for different languages. Mullan explained, "We plug into a bunch of different providers for the speech recognition as well as the large language model inference, and effectively what we do is we built an architecture where we can send the responses to the best model at the time." "So an example would be OpenAI, Google, Anthropic, all the big US providers will be great when it comes to English, Latin based languages and so on, but they'll tend to struggle with Asian character sets, so Chinese, Japanese, Korean and so on. In that case, we can spin it off to the DeepSeek, or to Qwen , or whoever, the best provider is," he said. The hardware is intentionally designed to be approachable and engaging, resembling a character rather than a device, and is equipped with high-performance processing, a full-colour HD touchscreen, high-quality speakers, and expressive RGB LED lighting. Norby's software supports a variety of large language models and is continually enhanced through regular updates. Norby's applications go beyond language learning. "Our problem at the moment is we have more requests from people than we can sort of deal with. I would say language and speech therapy is a really big one on the consumer side. The next area that we're moving into is much more the agentic productivity side," Mullan said. He described using Norby at home to manage daily tasks: "My Norby unit at home actually does things. I checks my email. It'll summarise my emails. I can ask Norby, okay, what's important for the day. And then what it'll do is, it's connected to my inbox, but also to my LinkedIn, to my social feeds, to my calendar. It'll take all of that stuff, create a summarisation." Addressing the broader technology landscape, Mullan compared Norby's form factor with other AI devices. "If you have something that's like projecting onto your hand, like, what happens when you walk out in daylight, right? So I think that's in their case, a big problem." "In the case of rabbit, I think they're doing some interesting stuff. Again, though my issue is, is that I think the moment you make a device that's very similar to a phoney form factor, you're effectively competing with the phone. And then in order to be able to move forward, what happens is, your expectation is that people have to carry this device and also carry the phone." "So we've made a deliberate decision not to do that. We've gone after a form factor that's a bit more anthropomorphised," he explained. Norby's adaptability is reflected in its ability to switch between personalities and modes depending on user needs. Parents, for example, can select predefined personas for their children, and the robot adapts its lessons to maintain engagement. "As the kids interact with Norby, it will course correct. So an example would be, okay, any kid that's learning a language, one of the challenges is engagement, right? Because they find it hard and boring. If it knows that, okay, there's an eight year old boy named Billy who's really into Roblox and Spider Man, it will then start to recreate those lessons in that context," Mullan said. Discussing privacy and security, Mullan stressed, "We take privacy and security seriously. Norby has been designed to be COPPA compliant. Our closed-system architecture means no access to third-party app stores or social media." Looking ahead, Mullan outlined the expansion of Norby's functionality, including the introduction of features such as singing, laughing, and emotional intelligence analysis. "There's a version that we're working on now that will sing, laugh, cry, whisper, yeah. I've had a chance to interact with that one. It's not production-ready yet, but it will happen," he said. "We're thrilled to be at this stage, and we're excited about the potential for Norby to make a difference in people's lives."
Techday NZ
04-06-2025
- Techday NZ
How Norby the language robot is more than just a compaion
Norby, an AI-powered language companion, highlights the exciting evolution of language learning through interactive and adaptive technology. Adrian Mullan, Founder and CEO of Norby, led the demonstration at Dell Technologies World in Las Vegas, highlighting the robot's ability to engage in natural conversations across multiple languages and contexts. Norby supports more than 30 languages, with new additions and updates rolled out through over-the-air software updates. Mullan said his motivation for developing Norby was rooted in his own experiences. "A few years ago, while helping my daughter with her homework, I noticed something troubling - she was bored and struggling to stay focused. Conventional learning materials simply couldn't hold her attention. That realization sparked the idea for Norby," he explained. Norby is designed to be more than just another digital assistant or educational tool. "Humans have an innate desire to connect, even with the things we create. We give objects human-like traits, attribute emotions to our pets, and name our digital assistants - it's part of who we are," Mullan said. "I didn't want another device that demanded my attention. I wanted a companion - something that helps me stay focused, in flow, and truly engaged. A companion that adapts to my personality, interests, and goals." During the demonstration, Mullan illustrated Norby's capabilities by asking it to greet the audience in various languages and accents, as well as to generate stories on demand. "Hey, Norby, can you do me a favour? Can you say hello to the journalists in the room?" Mullan asked. Norby responded with, "Hello everyone. I'd be happy to extend a greeting to the journalists present. I'm sure, Adrian, you'd like me to make a good impression, so I'll make sure to be as charismatic as possible on various projects, including sound checks and helping with your work on interactive voice companions." The device's multilingual proficiency is underpinned by a flexible architecture that allows Norby to select the best available models for different languages. Mullan explained, "We plug into a bunch of different providers for the speech recognition as well as the large language model inference, and effectively what we do is we built an architecture where we can send the responses to the best model at the time." "So an example would be OpenAI, Google, Anthropic, all the big US providers will be great when it comes to English, Latin based languages and so on, but they'll tend to struggle with Asian character sets, so Chinese, Japanese, Korean and so on. In that case, we can spin it off to the DeepSeek, or to Qwen , or whoever, the best provider is," he said. The hardware is intentionally designed to be approachable and engaging, resembling a character rather than a device, and is equipped with high-performance processing, a full-colour HD touchscreen, high-quality speakers, and expressive RGB LED lighting. Norby's software supports a variety of large language models and is continually enhanced through regular updates. Norby's applications go beyond language learning. "Our problem at the moment is we have more requests from people than we can sort of deal with. I would say language and speech therapy is a really big one on the consumer side. The next area that we're moving into is much more the agentic productivity side," Mullan said. He described using Norby at home to manage daily tasks: "My Norby unit at home actually does things. I checks my email. It'll summarise my emails. I can ask Norby, okay, what's important for the day. And then what it'll do is, it's connected to my inbox, but also to my LinkedIn, to my social feeds, to my calendar. It'll take all of that stuff, create a summarisation." Addressing the broader technology landscape, Mullan compared Norby's form factor with other AI devices. "If you have something that's like projecting onto your hand, like, what happens when you walk out in daylight, right? So I think that's in their case, a big problem." "In the case of rabbit, I think they're doing some interesting stuff. Again, though my issue is, is that I think the moment you make a device that's very similar to a phoney form factor, you're effectively competing with the phone. And then in order to be able to move forward, what happens is, your expectation is that people have to carry this device and also carry the phone." "So we've made a deliberate decision not to do that. We've gone after a form factor that's a bit more anthropomorphised," he explained. Norby's adaptability is reflected in its ability to switch between personalities and modes depending on user needs. Parents, for example, can select predefined personas for their children, and the robot adapts its lessons to maintain engagement. "As the kids interact with Norby, it will course correct. So an example would be, okay, any kid that's learning a language, one of the challenges is engagement, right? Because they find it hard and boring. If it knows that, okay, there's an eight year old boy named Billy who's really into Roblox and Spider Man, it will then start to recreate those lessons in that context," Mullan said. Discussing privacy and security, Mullan stressed, "We take privacy and security seriously. Norby has been designed to be COPPA compliant. Our closed-system architecture means no access to third-party app stores or social media." Looking ahead, Mullan outlined the expansion of Norby's functionality, including the introduction of features such as singing, laughing, and emotional intelligence analysis. "There's a version that we're working on now that will sing, laugh, cry, whisper, yeah. I've had a chance to interact with that one. It's not production-ready yet, but it will happen," he said. "We're thrilled to be at this stage, and we're excited about the potential for Norby to make a difference in people's lives."
