"Early recruitment numbers look good but like always the industry is experiencing shortages in forklift drivers and resourcing for unpalatable shifts, including night shifts. To complement our workforce Seeka is working with WINZ to train forklift drivers and is again arranging to bring out-of-town workers to our packhouses."
Last season it bought in a record 32.4m trays, it built a number of coolstores and would move to its new headquarters at Seeka 360 in the coming weeks, he says.
DMS Progrowers Ltd chief operating officer Derek Masters says it would employ more than 600 staff at its sites in Te Puna and Te Puke on par with last year.
"Recruitment has started and it's pleasing to see many return employees. We have nearly filled all critical roles, and have only a few shift supervisor-type roles to fill."
More G3 Sun Gold would be packed through both sites and slightly less Hayward green as the Green crops are down per hectare across the Bay of Plenty.
Feedback from growers had been largely positive.
"Gold growers are in good frame of mind. Most Green growers are okay but a small number of Green growers are concerned with a 30 per cent reduction in expected yields this season."
Meanwhile in the last 12 months DMS had built additional new coolstores and canopies on both sites while another two cool stores would be built later this year to prepare for the 2018 season, he says.
Trevelyan's Pack and Cool human resource manager Jodi Johnstone says it started recruitment in January and expected to employ about 1260 staff during peak harvest, which was similar to last year.
It is great to see many locals returning from previous seasons, she says and currently 180 people were working on site.
"They are doing export avocados, local market avocados, kiwifruit pest monitoring, crop estimations and season preparation and training. We expect to start picking around mid March."
The company expected the front end of the season to be similar to last year, she says.
"We do have an increase in the amount of Gold fruit we expect to pack, bearing in mind though that it was a late season in 2016."
Crops were also looking good, compared to last year but Green is slightly down.
"There appears to be less fruit at higher altitude compared to flat areas. Where the wind has able to get in the reject rates are higher than last year."
Last season Trevelyan packed record volumes of Gold and Green and the business continues to grow, she says.
"We have installed NIR technology in one of our packhouses.
"This gives us the ability to be able to split low dry matter populations of the fruit out of the crop. We built a lot of infrastructure last year but we are upgrading our bin storage areas, carparks and working on the road which crosses the gully between our packhouses and the back coolstores."
EastPack chief executive Hamish Simson says last year was a very long season both in harvest and storage due later flowering and maturing kiwifruit combined with record crop volumes so the sales cycle was longer.
This year the maturity (at this stage) is earlier, and the volumes are down, so this should mean a slightly shorter season, he says.
