Research technologist, Megan Wood, in the sensory lab where she analyses kiwifruit bred at the Kiwifruit Breeding Centre Photo: RNZ/Sally Round
Thousands and thousands of kiwifruit pass between the gloved fingers of research technologist Megan Wood, and she reaches for them just as a consumer might.
"Essentially, I just feel them, and I think I would eat that one.
"We've been doing it for years, so my best guess is usually pretty good."
She's a dab hand at analysing the fruit inside and out, working in the sensory lab at the Kiwifruit Breeding Centre (KBC) in Te Puke where the focus is on developing the kiwifruit of the future.
But that first gut feel is followed by a thorough analysis of every bit of the fruit, followed by taste tests and off-site examinations for nutritional benefits.
Probing a sample for firmness in the sensory lab Photo: RNZ/Sally Round
A kiwifruit may have too big a knobbly bit on its bottom - "We have had people in the past crack a tooth on it"; and cavities - "If the cavity is too big, too many critters will live in there, and we can't export it."
Then there are other features like shape, colour and sugar levels to grade and record.
Established in 2021, the KBC's Te Puke site is the headquarters for growing and testing new kiwifruit cultivars.
Kiwifruit is New Zealand's largest horticultural export, worth $3.9 billion in the year ended June 2025, following 2024's record crop.
The Kiwifruit Breeding Centre is careful to maintain security around its trials Photo: RNZ/Sally Round
KBC - which also has trial orchards in Kerikeri, Motueka, Gisborne and Italy - is a joint venture between Zespri and Plant and Food Research, now part of the Bioeconomy Science Institute.
It's led by chief executive Matt Glenn.
"We're sort of the grease in the wheels between the researchers in the laboratory and Zespri, who are the commercialisation partner, and that's really why we set up the joint venture as well, because we can focus really on deploying the technology, implementing it, and then driving it through to a commercial outcome."
And that process is a lengthy one - it can take up to 25 years from the initial idea to actual fruit on the shelf.
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Glenn said they start with a "concept" requested by Zespri and from there develop "elite parents" from raw germplasm originating in Sichuan, China, a process which takes four or five years.
It takes another five years for seedlings to grow and produce the required fruit at KBC's orchards around the country.
"Out of those 30 or 40,000 that we plant as seedlings every year, there's probably about two or 300 that go into the next stage, which is the clonal commercial testing."
That can take another five years.
Scientist and breeding co-ordinator Amar Nath in one of the trial orchards at the Kiwifruit Breeding Centre Photo: RNZ/Sally Round
"After 15 years, we might go back to Zespri and say, 'hey, do you remember 15 years ago you said you'd like a kiwifruit that look like this? Well, we think here are some candidates', and we present them to the Zespri board, and they go … 'they look pretty good, we think we'd like to have a bet on those', because it's quite a big bet they're making at that stage."
They then put them into the hands of the growers and grow them at hectare scale, before getting the fruit to market and saying "yeah, that's a winner, we're going to commercialise it".
The Te Puke headquarters has 40 hectares of trial orchards as well as laboratories and a cool store which tests the harvested fruit's resilience at the handling and storage stage.
The KBC's cool store where kiwifruit are graded and chilled. Photo: RNZ/Sally Round
Breeding for a future climate
Aside from improvements to existing varieties, KBC is also developing cultivars which will be able to cope with the changing climate, and its 30ha orchard in Kerikeri in Northland is an important testing ground, Glenn told Country Life.
"The modelling that we're seeing is telling us that the climate in the Bay of Plenty, where 80 percent of kiwifruit are grown, will be like Northland by about 2050, 2060.
"We have put [the cultivars] under that pressure, that evolutionary pressure, effectively of warmer, wetter temperatures than we get down here in the Bay … so by the time the Bay looks like that we know that we will have cultivars that will work successfully down here."
Increasing intense weather events are also considered in the breeding programme, with a trial orchard in Italy which is breeding new root stocks to deal with very wet heavy soils.
"At the same time, we're going to have areas, that are going to have soils that are salinating, or soils that are very dry, so we've actually got to be looking at every extreme in just about everything that we do."
Tom Paterson tastes another kiwifruit sample in the interests of research at the Kiwifruit Breeding Centre Photo: RNZ/Sally Round
Glenn said successful fruit pass tests in three different areas - they have all the things a consumer wants, good yield and resilience for the grower and are supply chain ready.
"We've got to make sure that the fruit don't have spikes on them that so they [don't] puncture other fruit as they go through the process, got to make sure that they're really hardy, so you can pick them while they're quite firm, but then they'll go through the supply chain really well.
"If any one of those three things is missing, the likelihood is that the fruit won't be successful."
Glenn said they were also working on developing a green kiwifruit "that may not need some of the chemical inputs that the farmers use traditionally".
Speeding up the process
Artificial intelligence and precision breeding, also known as gene editing, could help speed up the lengthy process, Glenn said.
AI will help in decision-making with the large amount of data they collect but "you've still got to ground truth all the things that you do, so you've got to put seeds in the ground and grow them, and look at the fruit, and look at multiple fruit, and see if that's really going to be sustainable".
Kiwifruit samples from a particular vine ready for analysis Photo: RNZ/Sally Round
"What we're particularly interested in is the precision breeding. Some people call it gene editing, but we call it precision breeding, where you're making really small base pair level changes.
"You're not introducing any DNA, and you might be just up-regulating or down-regulating particular genes within the genome, so what you're doing is you're maximising the potential of the genetics that are already in the plant."
But he said they can't use the technology, being used in contained greenhouses and labs at the moment, until there's a change in legislation.
"We just think we need to be a bit more sophisticated than we've been over the last 30 years of having a really blunt legal instrument to deal with new technologies that are going to really help us advance the industry."
Learn more:
- Find out more about the Kiwifruit Breeding Centre here
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