Rural delivery: Feijoa has bright future in processing

By ROSALIE SMITH*

In a Herald column a food expert wrote of Aucklanders exchanging bags of feijoas picked up from under backyard trees.

These neighbourly gifts, mostly small and misshapen, are a far cry from the huge and luscious beauties, weighing more than 300g and the size of a small apple, produced by dedicated commercial growers.

Some Aucklanders were willing to pay far more for their neighbours' feijoas than the $5 a kilo growers receive.

Growers do not let their mature fruit drop to the ground. They and their staff go round every feijoa tree each day picking fruit by touch, just before it is ready to fall to the ground.

They handle the delicate skins with the utmost care, avoiding bruising and skin breaks and thus prolonging the fruit's shelf life.

Their finest fruit is probably air-freighted to California and Asian markets.

A well-grown, fresh, ripe feijoa is a taste delight. To a feijoa addict April usually brings the first sniff of the fruit's distinctive aroma, a mouth-watering promise of that delicious flavour to be enjoyed over the next six weeks or so.

It is a flavour appreciated by many nationalities. Asians, especially, respond to the sweet, aromatic taste.

Veteran Whakatane grower Tony Firmin has an orchard and cafe on the main highway to Rotorua and he testifies to tourists' appreciation of feijoas, both fresh and made into wine.

Tony has bred several new varieties for the fresh fruit market, but it is in processing that he sees the feijoa's potential.

"It retains its fresh fruit flavour when processed for wine, juice, yoghurt, ice cream, or for adding to confectionery or cereals," he says.

"The possibilities are unlimited. [Cereal-maker] Dick Hubbard appreciated this when he developed his product Forever Feijoa. We could be selling to the world.

"We have a unique product. We are the only country with a feijoa industry.

"Though the fruit is commercially grown in California, Israel and some other Mediterranean countries, it is a minimal crop compared with its situation in New Zealand, where soil and climate are just about ideal.

"Australia has small plantings, mainly in coastal Victoria, but so far no significant industry."

Firmin likens the feijoa to the mango. While some mangoes are available as fresh fruit, many more are processed for use in drinks and ice cream.

Many feijoa growers are part-timers, leaving their fruit to drop and harvesting it into bins for processing. Firmin says they are missing out on higher returns. More care in management, including feeding, irrigating and pruning, would result in higher yields of larger fruit.

Processors reward suppliers of large fruit because they have proportionately less peel and more flesh.

Firmin sees an urgent need for processing varieties. They should have either a high juice content with minimal skin bitterness for juicing and wine, or be rounder in shape, with higher solids and a thin skin, which are more suitable for abrasive peeling and freeze-drying.

In both cases the new variety should be sweeter than the fruit widely available at present. He already grows several with Brix (sugar) levels two points higher than average, and maybe the perfect processing variety is among the hundreds of young tree he is trialling.

The formation of a grower co-operative for marketing process fruit means processors can now obtain reliable volumes of quality fruit, and give growers better returns.

Firmin sees the day when carefully tended orchards will produce large, high-quality fruit for processing, and orchardists will make a return at least on a par with that of kiwifruit growers.

* Rosalie Smith is a freelance journalist specialising in horticulture.