Enza joins forces with UK food group

The Apple and Pear Marketing Board is spinning off its British operations into a joint venture with listed UK food group Geest Plc.

The board's export marketing arm, Enzafruit, is portraying the new business - with a $330 million turnover - as the next step in its plan to become a year-round global fruit marketer.

The joint venture, Enzafruit World Wide, will be owned by Enzafruit and Geest World Wide Fruit, a division of Geest Foods.

Enzafruit will continue to control the supply of fruit and will pay the joint-venture commission on the sales it makes.

Enzafruit will shut down its sales, marketing and administration offices in central London, and the cost reductions are expected to contribute to the venture's profitability in its first year.

Marketing will be controlled from Geest World Wide Fruit's offices at Spalding, in Lincolnshire, where Geest has packing, coolstore and ripening facilities, sited for same-day delivery to all parts of Britain.

Geest, which has similar ventures in the fish and vegetable sectors, will also absorb Enzafruit's logistics centre at Gillingham, in Kent.

Enzafruit World Wide will be headed by Enzafruit's general manager for global sales, Alasdair Robinson.

Industry sources said it was not yet clear what the merger would mean for the board's relationship in Britain with Kiwifruit New Zealand.

Until now the two boards have run a joint Enza and Zespri sales operation in the lucrative British market, with Enzafruit marketing kiwifruit on an agency basis for Zespri's European arm, based in Antwerp.

An Enzafruit spokeswoman said the agency sales of kiwifruit would shift from London to Geest's Spalding operation, as long as Zespri agreed. But in 1996, Zespri effectively dumped Geest as its exclusive agency for New Zealand kiwifruit in Britain after it failed to meet a Kiwifruit Marketing Board target set in 1994. That target was to double British sales of kiwifruit within two years, to four million trays.

Zespri was not the only fruit exporter to give up on Geest in 1996. Both the New Zealand and South African pipfruit marketing boards dispensed with the services of Geest's world wide fruit division that year.

Enzafruit chairman John McCliskie said the board's return to Geest reflected the need to improve efficiencies in a highly competitive market.

Mr McCliskie said Geest World Wide had strong connections with several key British supermarket chains, in particular Marks and Spencer, Sainsbury's and Tesco.

- NZPA