A Hawke’s Bay manufacturer has installed the first 50 of its latest apple packing robots in the United States and has another 250 on order, and says demand from American packhouses is now running ahead of what its Hastings factory can build.
Hawk Technology general manager Sam Combs told RNZ the company had built a few hundred machines for the New Zealand market over the past few years, and that the American market was the one now taking off.
“The American market’s about seven times the size of New Zealand for apples only. Washington’s the Hawke’s Bay equivalent of New Zealand and grows about two-thirds of the fruit. So we’ve gone and focused on that area. And yeah, the demand at this stage is greater than our manufacturing capability,” Combs said.
Washington state accounts for roughly two-thirds of American apple production, out of a national crop of about 4.7 million tonnes a year. That makes it the single most concentrated market in the world for the sort of machine Hawk builds, and it explains why a company operating out of Whakatu, on the edge of Hastings, has ended up shipping containers of robots halfway around the world.
The business did not start out in robotics. It began more than 30 years ago when Combs’ grandfather was collecting kerbside recycling to process and export through his business, All Brite Industries. The family later bought Hawk Packaging and began turning that recycled material into the cardboard trays that sit between the layers of fruit inside an export carton.
The move into machinery came from customers asking for it. “We had customers start coming to us and say, ‘hey, look, you supply your trays in bundles of 175 trays, and we’ve just got someone essentially standing there grabbing a tray and putting it onto a conveyor belt, is there some way that you can automate that for us’?” Combs said.
The first machine the company designed was a tray denester, which splits a bundle of trays apart. A tray inserter followed. The third product, the robotic apple packer, has been the one that sold. It uses 15 cameras working at once to inspect each apple for flaws and then place it into a tray according to its colour and quality.
Hawk’s own product specifications put the machine at more than 165 fruit a minute across 12 simultaneous inspection zones, handling apple count sizes from 60 through to 180 without a parts change, and saving up to two labour units per packing lane. It is built to retrofit onto the Tomra, Greefa and MAF graders already sitting in most large packhouses, which matters commercially because it means a buyer does not have to rebuild a packing line to take one.
Combs said the closely held part of the design is not the vision system but the way the fruit is moved. “Probably where most of the IP sits is how we handle the fruit… it presents stem and calyx to the cameras so the guys upstairs can take photos and do the defects. This is quite a special piece of development, and is big part of what makes the machine so attractive,” he said.
All of it is done in Hawke’s Bay. “We’ve got a full design team in-house. We’ve got fabrication in-house, and electricals in-house. A big philosophy of ours is just keeping everything here. We didn’t want to have to send stuff overseas, and we wanted our design team and our fabrication team and our assembly team in the same room,” Combs said.
The obvious question about a machine that packs fruit is what happens to the people who used to do it. Combs said that in New Zealand at least, the robots have been filling a gap rather than clearing one out. “In New Zealand it was a real problem for our customers to even find that labour in the first place, so it’s there to complement their existing workforces,” he said.
Alan McDonald of the Employers and Manufacturers Association said the pattern held more broadly. “I know there’s a lot of concern about AI replacing people, but what we’ve seen in the past is that’s not the case – there’s displacement, re-training and different skills required, but more or less the same numbers are retained in the workplace,” he said. “The common thing that we’re hearing is that the issue with AI is it still needs human oversight and human input to work effectively in the workplace – so it’s about how do we adjust those tasks, how do we re train our people.” The association is holding a conference in Auckland on Tuesday night, Workforce 2030, on how employers should prepare.
That has been the experience in local packhouses so far. Newswire reported in June that Napier exporter Taylor Corp roughly doubled the volume of fruit it exports after putting AI grading and robots through its packhouse, without much change to the number of people it employs.
The timing suits the industry. New Zealand Apples and Pears has forecast export revenue of about $1.3 billion for the year to 30 June 2026, an increase of 5.5 per cent, with growers targeting $2 billion by 2035. Chief executive Danielle Adsett said growers had benefited from a second consecutive season of good growing conditions, which had supported both fruit quality and yield. Selling the equipment as well as the fruit is a second, much smaller export line that nobody counts in those numbers.
Hawk has scaled up to keep pace. Seven years ago it had two research and development staff. It now has more than 50. Senior mechatronics engineer Ben Kloosterman is writing the software that drives the current generation of packer, covering everything from motor movement to the vision processing and the AI models the company trains itself.
“Previously with industrial automation it was always a bit frustrating cause the technology was like 20 years behind, so being free to learn and grow in that cutting edge technology is really really cool,” Kloosterman said.
The next market the company is eyeing is stone fruit, which is harder to handle and bruises more easily than an apple. “Stone fruit is on the horizon… for us, it’s an obvious kind of next cab off the ranks. We’ll be looking into that over the next year or so,” Combs said.
Do you think automation in the packhouse is good news for New Zealand workers, or are the job losses still ahead of us? Tell us what you think 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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