“To help our employees through this difficult period, we are gifting leave to our people over the Christmas and New Year period and this will not be deducted from their annual leave entitlements.”
The Herald understands dozens of redundancies are expected at manufacturing plants and sales and service sites in Auckland, Hamilton, Tauranga and Hastings.
One of those sites is a brand new $14 million building near Hamilton Airport, built by BBC Technologies, a fruit technology manufacturer that Tomra bought for $66.9m in 2018.
Tomra, publicly listed on the Oslo stock exchange, announced its cost reduction plan when releasing its third-quarter financial results in late October.
The company plans to simplify its food business and reduce costs by €30m ($53m) and is understood to be cutting around 300 roles globally.
New Zealand appears heavily affected, with Tomra looking to create a regional structure consisting of the Americas and Asia Pacific and within those regions, merge its fresh and processed sales and service organisations into one team.
“We want to ensure we have the right people in the right place, in the right time zone,” Tomra Food executive vice-president Harald Henriksen said in October.
Aside from BBC Technologies, Tomra also owns fruit sorting company Compac Holdings, which supplies crucial equipment to the kiwifruit industry.
Founded by Hamish Kennedy in 1984, Compac designs and builds machines to weigh and sort fruit and vegetables, using software, computers, electronics and video cameras to help match fruit ripeness with market delivery.
The company claims its machines are the fastest in the world, with the ability to sort more than 100 pieces a second.
Tomra’s two New Zealand subsidies claimed wage subsidies for 413 staff during the initial level 4 Covid lockdown in April 2020.
