Zespri International and Tauranga Kiwifruit Logistics (TKL) will work with the Port of Tauranga under a new 10-year freight agreement to develop additional infrastructure to handle the increase in kiwifruit exports.
The agreement was disclosed in the Port of Tauranga's recently released six-month results, which showed kiwifruit exports handled by the port increased 22.9 per cent to 413,102 tonnes for the six months to December 2015, compared with the previous corresponding period.
Port chief executive Mark Cairns said, in an interview, the agreement had been reached last year, but hadn't been publicised at the time as it was planned to announce it with the six-month results.
"With the kiwifruit, it's about where we put the cool storage - we have to make multimillion investments and, in this case, it is over a 10-year agreement."
The parties in the new partnership are kiwifruit exporting entity Zespri, and TKL, the freight logistics company controlled by the major Bay of Plenty post-harvest operators including Seeka, East Pack, Apata, DMS and Trevelyan's, which is based at the port.
TKL chief executive Ian Mearns said the agreement had been reached to respond to the significant increase in kiwifruit export volumes expected in the coming years.
Mr Mearns said the agreement so far was at the first stage of discussion on what was required to upgrade on-wharf infrastructure.
"We currently have a cool store that we use on the port during the season, which is right next to our berth, and we use that cool store to facilitate the loading of charter vessels," he said.
They would be aiming to begin upgrading the cool store facilities this year, and were looking at a series of other developments, which could not be disclosed at this stage for reasons of commercial confidentiality, he said.
Port commercial manager Leonard Sampson said the details of the new agreement remained commercially sensitive.
"At a broad level, there's definite growth in terms of the kiwifruit harvest profile - in particular with the new variety of Gold," he said.
