The Government's primary growth partnership geared toward driving change in the dairy sector had an unlikely partner: kiwifruit export marketing body Zespri International.
The $170 million innovation investment involving the Ministry for Primary Industries and commercial partners, including DairyNZ and Fonterra Co-operative Group, is in its seventh and final year.
The partnership focused on creating new products, lifting productivity, improving environmental protection and building capability, and includes a raft of projects aimed at boosting the economy by $2.7 billion a year by 2020. The private sector contributed $85m while the Government contributed the other $85m.
Fonterra programme manager Andrew Fletcher said the connection between work that Fonterra carried out as part of the PGP and Zespri "comes back to the way we experience food. It's not just taste that drives our liking, but a big part of it is structure," he said at a briefing in Wellington.
Food structure science was critical to work at Fonterra in its bid to create things like cream that no longer had to be refrigerated in order to whip properly as well as mozzarella cheese, and Fletcher noted kiwifruit has a real "Goldilocks spot" - neither too firm nor too soft. The question became "how do we apply the tools of food structure science to making fruit," he said.