Jen Scoular: Many opportunities for avocados in China

New Zealand avocados have now gained greater access to the Chinese market.

We are very excited to report that avocados from New Zealand have gained access to the China market.

We have been investing in understanding the China market, and building political relationships there, with visits over four years by myself and the Chair.

Exporters have also been building commercial relationships, and many already have ties to China through other export products.

We did expect to have the technical audit the week prior to Christmas last year, but it was delayed until late January by a technical issue on their side.

The good part of that was that the week before Christmas was a lovely week — it had been blocked in my diary for the China visit, so I caught up on a whole lot of stuff instead.

But coming back from the Christmas break, the mountain ahead looked pretty arduous.

At the tail end of a low volume season, finding harvestable fruit in late January was the first hurdle, the second was finding growers with fruit, who would demonstrate textbook compliance to all industry systems, including adherence to the new Official Assurance Program (OAP) finalised only a few months prior.

So we were very lucky to have the fantastic commitment from three of our growers, and one of our packhouses to undertake the lengthy preparation, and then the technical audit.
It's not that the requirements are very different for China, but that every single part of those requirements was up to be checked.

MPI did a great job with NZ Avocado taking our growers and packhouse through an initial audit, then a systems audit, to iron out any issues.

Following the orchard inspection visits the audit team went to Just Avocados packhouse where avocados harvested from the audited orchards were packed.

This fruit was then inspected by the officials. Helen Gray, Quality Manager at Just Avocados, had worked for months of long days to get the packhouse systems ready for the audit, including re-writing the facilities procedures to align with the new OAP, clearing the packhouse and preparing the staff who would be present during the day.

There was then the decision about whether we would actually ship the product that had been harvested and packed under the critical eye of the auditors. The shipping isn't part of the audit, but its part of the eventual process and the quality of the fruit was great, and MPI recommended that we finish the process, and actually start trade.

So an airfreight shipment was sent to Shanghai and our NZTE, MPI and MFAT colleagues were able to enjoy the deliciousness of late season avocados from New Zealand. They did a great job to get the Chinese officials, some media and some of New Zealand's important trade partners along to the event at the NZ Consulate.

We got great visibility with an excellent news item from a Shanghai TV and radio station and MPI.

This milestone event for the industry took significant effort from a small group of people working on behalf of the industry.

Having succeeded in getting to the start line we now need the whole industry to perform to similar levels to ensure we leverage the terrific opportunity ahead.