Kūmara shortage: What’s the difference between kūmara and sweet potato Proper Crisps

Is New Zealand-grown kūmara interchangeable with sweet potatoes grown overseas? Photo / 123rf

It’s been several months now since Cyclone Gabrielle devastated parts of the North Island, leaving a trail of destruction the horticulture industry is yet to recover from.

Farmers and growers in the Hawke’s Bay and Gisborne areas in particular are still waiting for crops to return to their full strength, and along with the rising cost of living, the effects are still being keenly felt in the produce section at the supermarket.

You might have noticed that the price of kūmara especially has skyrocketed in recent months, and that’s all down to a severe shortage following the cyclone.

There are several different varieties of kūmara. Photo / 123rf

Now, Kiwi chip company Proper Crisps have swapped out their popular kūmara chips for those made from sweet potatoes grown in Australia - so if you’ve spotted them in the chip aisle, you might have done a double take.

Kūmara is a staple on the Kiwi dinner table, whether it’s in a hāngī, starring in a Sunday roast or tossed through a summer salad, but is it really the same thing as a sweet potato?

Proper Crisps source their kūmara from Kaipara Kūmara in Northland - and their commercial manager Duncan Kerr tells the Herald it was pretty much a no-brainer to look over the ditch for help amid the shortage.

“The shortage was pretty much straight after the cyclone. So they’d had a truckload of rain up there right through December, January, February, and then the cyclone hit at the worst time. That much rain ruins the quality of the kūmara, and then right on harvest, you just couldn’t get anything on to the paddocks to actually pull out the kūmara,” he explains.

Do sweet potato chips taste the same as kūmara chips? Photo / Proper Crisps

Kaipara’s largest grower lost 99 per cent of his crop, he says.

“So that meant everyone was in short supply for kūmara, and that’s pretty much going to carry on until the new season. We’ll get [a] new crop in March, April next year.”

Proper Crisps bought what was left of Kaipara’s crop for a higher price than normal, and decided “pretty quickly” to source the rest of their product from Australia this year. The Aussie sweet potatoes arrived last month and have now hit shelves in chip form.

Kerr says it’s a bit early to tell how customers are liking it just yet, but says Kiwi supermarkets have been “very supportive” so far.

“They understand the situation and they helped us [to] get it arranged very quickly and be able to supply and keep that shelf space open for us. It’s been good.”

So, will chip lovers notice the difference?

“The avid kūmara buyer would probably notice a couple of differences in the colour of some of them,” he says.

Whether you like your kūmara baked, roasted or fried, it's a staple of every Kiwi's diet. Photo / 123RF

“They’ve got some exotic names in Australia, like purple Hawaiian and white king and things like that. So we’ve tried to make sure we’ve got a variety of sweet potatoes in the bag.

“The most common one is a Beauregard, which is what we use in New Zealand as well. Slightly different growing conditions, so a slightly different flavour, but fundamentally, I think most people will be really happy with the quality that we’ve managed to get out of Australia.”

But if he had to choose between the two, he admits, “I’d probably go [with] the New Zealand one.”

“There’s a nice glassy, crunchy one I quite like, which we haven’t been able to source a lot of in Australia.”

And until New Zealand kūmara make it back on to our shelves in full force, Kerr is grateful for Kaipara’s support, adding that even though the chips are technically Australian, the benefits are still going to Kaipara growers.

“I know they’re doing it tough, and we hope that consumers will certainly support them.”

Kaipara Kūmara’s Anthony Blundell recently told Newstalk ZB’s Mike Hosking the loss of product had been “diabolical”.

“Bearing in mind that October, November, December were the planting months, and harvest is February to April, as an industry, we pretty much not only lost a lot of crop through Cyclone Gabrielle, but we also had a really ordinary growing season - 70 per cent down by volume. [It] was just unprecedented for us,” he said.

Asked whether Proper Crisps’ move to use Aussie-grown sweet potatoes instead was a “blow to the industry”, Blundell replied, “Absolutely not” - and pointed to Kaipara’s decade-long relationship with the chip company.

“We’ve got to keep kūmara chips on supermarket shelves, and the actual variety of sweet potato they grow over there is not too dissimilar to ours,” he said.

“They [Proper Crisps] are right back on board as soon as we can get cracking with the 2024 harvest.”