A group of Hawke’s Bay vegetable growers is exploring whether they can club together and take over McCain Foods’ frozen vegetable plant in Hastings before the company shuts the gates in January and ships the processing machinery overseas. More than 100 growers of peas, beans, sweetcorn and carrots are facing the loss of their main local buyer when McCain closes the facility on 31 January next year, 30 years after it bought the site from Grower Foods in 1996.
The plant processes more than 50,000 tonnes of vegetables a year, and growers fear that once McCain dismantles the lines and freezes them off to another country, the option of growing process vegetables in Hawke’s Bay disappears with the steel. McCain has confirmed it has fielded “potential interest in the plant and its equipment from several parties”, which is what has kept the grower buyout idea alive through a tight window of less than nine months.
Central Hawke’s Bay farmer Alistair Setter, who runs 180 hectares and earns about a quarter of his income from supplying peas to McCain, told RNZ the takeover concept was daunting but not absurd. “It’s a big thing to try and organise, and it’s a big business, but there is a lot of will out there. The farmers we know around here, a lot of them are really capable business people so sometimes when there is a will and a need… maybe there is a way,” he said. Hugh Ritchie, who has supplied peas to the plant for more than 30 years, was blunter about what is at stake. “If we don’t solve this problem and really understand why it’s happening then it’s just going to be the start of a downward spiral on the domestic production of food,” he said.
The contractors who service the McCain crop are already winding back. Stuart Davies, who owns Fogarty Spraying and covers around 1,500 hectares of McCain vegetables each season, is preparing to cut one worker and may have to sell off some of his spraying gear, with no replacement contract on the horizon. That kind of secondary loss, of skilled labour and specialised machinery, is exactly what worries the growers backing a buyout, because once it is gone it does not come back quickly.
The McCain closure landed on top of a separate decision by Heinz Wattie’s to scale back its Hawke’s Bay operations, leaving two of the region’s biggest food processors retreating at once. On 6 May, Hastings Mayor Wendy Schollum and Central Hawke’s Bay Mayor Will Foley convened a meeting of growers, processors and sector representatives to thrash out a response. Schollum said the message from the room was that the cost and reliability of energy was now the single biggest barrier to anyone investing in new processing capacity. “Energy came through strongly as a key issue, both in terms of cost and certainty. Businesses need confidence that energy will be available, reliable and affordable before they can invest for the future,” she said in a statement reported by Scoop.
Foley framed the meeting as the start of a rescue plan rather than a wake. “We need to be finding a pathway forward for them,” he told the gathering. The two councils have agreed to push a list of barriers, including energy, water security, infrastructure, consenting times, and business compliance costs, up the chain to the Primary Production Select Committee for a parliamentary briefing.
Agriculture Minister Todd McClay has asked to meet the mayors during a planned visit to Hawke’s Bay, and Green Party MP Steve Abel has also travelled to the region to talk to growers. Both visits will give the buyout group a chance to test the political appetite for some form of transitional support, whether that is help with the cost of the plant itself, a grant for an energy upgrade, or simply faster consenting for any new owner-operator who picks up where McCain leaves off.
The wider context is unhelpful. Interest.co.nz on Tuesday led with a Westpac forecast that Middle East fuel costs would knock New Zealand’s economy off course, weaken household disposable income, and put further pressure on the housing market. RNZ Business ran the Westpac note alongside a story showing rural households are now spending up to a quarter of their budget on fuel, a particular squeeze on the very farming communities asked to invest in fresh processing capacity in Hastings.
The growers exploring the McCain buyout are not blind to those numbers. They are aware that taking on a frozen vegetable plant in 2026, with energy prices uncertain, capital expensive and supermarket margins squeezed, is not the kind of deal a bank rushes to fund. What is keeping them at the table is the alternative, which is to watch a regional industry built up over three decades evaporate in a single summer, along with the contractors, the seed suppliers, the harvest crews and the cool stores that depend on it.
Whether a grower-led consortium can move fast enough to commit capital, find a processing operator and negotiate with McCain in the time available will be clearer in the next few weeks. If it does not, the McCain machinery will be packed into containers, the Hastings site will look for a new use, and Hawke’s Bay’s standing as one of the country’s main food production regions will quietly contract.
What do you think, can a grower-owned co-operative make the Hastings vegetable plant work where a global processor decided it could not, and should the Government step in to keep food processing capacity onshore? Have your say in the comments below.
This article was written by AI, briefed to report the facts, hopefully without some of the bias people bring to the job 🙂
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