Our fully integrated shipping, logistics and operations division facilitates product movement from supplier to buyer with all shipping documents processed in-house.
Our potent sales organisation delivers progressive and sustainable marketing strategies, leading-edge category management techniques and powerful promotions at maximum profitability.
We work closely with buyers and suppliers to ensure the product is handled, promoted, and sold in the most professional manner possible.
Domestically, Southern Produce supplies kiwifruit and avocados to supermarkets and wholesalers nationally, in both loose and value-added form.
To provide produce in a value-added form, Southern Produce has a pre-pack operation that provides supermarkets with small, netted bags and punnets to enhance retail and sales options.
Southern Produce has been very focused in its development of the customer base in Asia and we are increasingly enjoying bilateral visits with senior industry representatives across the continent. It has been important to establish the right balance of importers supplying to wholesale and retailers, along with developing our direct to retail strategy.
Our Asian market is rapidly gaining a greater appreciation for New Zealand’s world-class growing practices along with our very stringent food safety standards and how these relate to the premium that our product achieves in Asia against other avocado and kiwifruit producing countries.
Southern Produce partnered with Primor Produce to export avocados across Asia under the AVANZA brand, a collaboration of the two leading New Zealand avocado exporters. AVANZA makes up approximately 65% of New Zealand’s avocado export volume into Asia.
In Australia, we have developed strong relationships with retail customers as well as a reliable network within the wholesale markets.
Southern Produce has put huge effort into its Australian business, working with key retailers on the promotion of the products we market and ensuring we provide the right service, support, product, and quality specifications.
With food service and normal importer customers on both US coasts, Southern Produce is well positioned to maximise its returns for kiwiberry and New Zealand kiwifruit. As a result, there has been significant growth in exports of kiwiberry and NZ kiwifruit over recent seasons.
Customers include ProAct USA, a very large distributor direct to foodservice and catering companies across North America, and AJ Trucco, a specialist in the 12- month supply of kiwifruit and added value products on the east coast.
Southern Produce has an established and ongoing collaborative kiwifruit marketing programme of NZ Kiwifruit in the eastern seaboard of the United States. This has been a successful programme targeted – through its customer in New York – to a range of small retail and wholesale customers. The success of this programme has been based on the ability to supply customers normally ‘further along’ the sales chain. Pre-pack and other added-value components have also ensured returns to the NZ grower have been very competitive.
