Bay company producing jumbo blueberries

JUMBO: Blueberries the size of a $2 coin could be on New Zealand supermarket shelves next summer. PHOTO/SUPPLIED

Kiwi consumers could soon have their pick of a new super-sized superfood - a jumbo blueberry the size of a $2 coin.

BerryCo - a joint venture between Bay of Plenty's Southern Produce and Valleyfresh in Victoria - has aquired the exclusive New Zealand rights to the product and will be planting the first 40ha over the next few months.

Dubbed the "Eureka", the behemoth berry is among an Aussie-grown range and dwarfs the typical blueberry Kiwis are used to munching in muffins. Its backers expect that New Zealand production of the juicy heavyweight will pull in $8 million in the first two seasons alone.

The home-grown purple monsters will be initially sold into Southeast Asian markets - a 200g punnet can fetch $12.95 in Singapore - but they could also appear on New Zealand store shelves as early as next summer.

Sourced from Australia's Mountain Blue Orchards, the jumbo fruit have promisingly high yields - and their bulky size means fewer fruit are needed to fill punnets.

Eureka's export potential in Southeast Asia hadn't been tested until last year, when BerryCo shipped about 300 tonnes of the jumbo berries to markets in Singapore, Thailand, Hong Kong and the United Arab Emirates.

The company's director, Carwyn Williams, said the big berries also attracted promising feedback when presented at a Hong Kong trade expo.

"We came away with more customers and more orders than we can currently supply but that's a good problem to have," Mr Williams said.

"As the New Zealand-grown berries become available for export, we will have hungry, ready-made markets waiting, including food service, catering and bakery lines in Europe."

Growers will also get a glimpse of the Eureka when BerryCo shares some of its research at a Tauranga field day next week.

Since receiving about 2000 plants in November, researchers at the company's Tauranga facility have been working alongside PlusGroup Horticulture on trials and testing new potting substrate mixes.

The team was joined by two Waikato University researchers, who monitored the growth and development of the nursery plants.

The company will be delivering its first 200,000 propagated plants to licensed growers this year, with the first plants distributed for planting in March. Today, about 700ha of blueberry crops are grown in New Zealand, with about 25 commercial growers and another 50 part-time.

In 2015-16, the overall value of our blueberry industry was $57m, with a $35m export market that could grow to more than $60m by 2022.

The fruits of Kiwi innovation

New Zealand has a rich and often-strange history of innovating new and improved fruit and vegetables. Here's our pick of the crop.

The Richie McCaw of kiwifruit: Scientists had their work cut out for them when they were tasked with developing a new kiwifruit to improve on what has been one of the world's most popular New Zealand-grown fruit: the Green or Hayward.

Likened to creating the "Richie McCaw of kiwifruit", that title might have been better suited to the Hayward, which, for 60 years, had been unmatched in its high yield, long storage time, flavoursome taste and nutritional firepower.

Just one of the furry, oval-shaped fruits packs more fibre than four sticks of celery and more vitamin C than an orange.

But scientists at Zespri and Plant & Food Research have succeeded in finding what's poised to be the new jewel of our billion-dollar kiwifruit industry.

The Zespri New Green is better to eat, ripens easily and lasts longer.