New Zealand's kiwifruit industry has loaded its largest ever shipment for the northern European market.
The Danish vessel MV Knud Lauritzen was loaded with about 90 million fruit over 30 hours since Monday, and left Tauranga today.
The 165m vessel, one of the largest refrigerated ships in the world, is full to capacity with 9,000 pallets, or 2.6 million trays, of Zespri green, gold and organic kiwifruit.
"It's the single biggest loading of kiwifruit from New Zealand," Zespri chief executive Tim Goodacre said.
"The New Zealand kiwifruit industry is in a unique position to be able to support the loading of a vessel of this size," Goodacre said.
"It is the economy of scale that Zespri has and the strength of the Single Point Entry and the Zespri System, the integrated orchard to consumer process that allows us to load a vessel of this size and capture the efficiencies that it presents."
"As well as the freight savings Zespri is making by maximising the total capacity of the vessel, shipping this volume of fruit gives much needed throughput for the coolstores, which are bursting at this time of year. It also delivers a significant volume of Zespri Kiwifruit into the market at an optimum time," said Goodacre.
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