The Seed Rack Looks Like A Dozen Companies. Follow It Back And It's One Building In New Plymouth.

Stand in front of the seed stand at a garden centre this month and you will see a lot of brands. Yates. Mr Fothergill's. McGregor's. Kiwi Garden. Different logos, different colours, different prices, arranged like competitors.

An insurance company profile from January 2021 put it better than I can. You may not know Egmont Seeds by name, it said, but you will have come across their products if you have ever admired flowers in a park, bought a carrot at the supermarket, or picked up a name brand seed packet at your local nursery.

One family business, 23 staff, eight countries

Egmont Seeds is in New Plymouth. Founded in 1996 by John McCullough and Neville McFarlane, family owned, and by its own description 100% New Zealand operated.

1News described it in September 2024 as the country's largest importer of plant seeds. McCullough said they hold easily two to three thousand species or varieties, and that they are by far the biggest in New Zealand. They import from America, Europe, the United Kingdom, Italy, France, Germany, Japan and Australia.

The customer list is the part worth slowing down for. McCullough told 1News they supply nurseries and cut flower growers producing plants for Bunnings, Mitre 10, Oderings, The Warehouse and the like, and that their warehouses hold stock sent all over the country including to Yates, Mr Fothergill's and Oderings.

The 2021 profile is more specific again. Egmont acts as a managed warehouse for the Dutch company Nunhems Seeds, which supplies large companies such as Wattie's. Egmont also contracts for Yates, McGregor's, Mr Fothergill's and Kiwi Garden, which in turn supply Bunnings, Mitre 10, The Warehouse and supermarkets with their packet seeds. Twenty-three staff at the time. German machinery that makes empty packets at 6.6 a second. They did New World's Little Garden too.

That profile is five years old, so treat the Nunhems arrangement as where things stood in 2021 rather than a statement about today.

Where the names actually go

Nunhems used to be Bayer's global vegetable seeds business. Bayer had to sell it to get the Monsanto takeover approved, and BASF closed the purchase on 16 August 2018. Twenty-four crops, around 2,600 varieties, part of a package with a total price of 7.6 billion euro.

So vegetable seed warehoused in Taranaki and supplied to Wattie's belongs to a German chemical company, which owns it because a different German chemical company was buying Monsanto.

Yates is the older story and the stranger one. Arthur Yates arrived in New Zealand in 1879, worked as a shepherd in Otago, and found that harvesting and selling grass seed paid better. He set up as a seed merchant in Auckland in 1883 and had a packet seed range for home gardeners by 1893.

Then the twentieth century happened to it. The finance company Equiticorp took control in a hostile takeover in 1985. Equiticorp collapsed, and Yates went into receivership alongside nearly a hundred other companies. The Australian arm, separated from the New Zealand business since 1906, bought it back in 1987.

Orica purchased Yates Australia and New Zealand in 2004. Orica demerged its consumer products division in 2010 to create DuluxGroup. Nippon Paint Holdings bought DuluxGroup in 2019.

The oldest seed name in the country is now owned by a Japanese paint manufacturer, and sits in a group alongside garage doors and cabinet hardware.

Their own history page tells all of this, and it is worth noticing where the prose stops. The written story ends with Yates being proud to be part of DuluxGroup, alongside Dulux, Selleys, Cabot's and British Paints. The Nippon Paint purchase appears only further down, in the list of dates.

There is one more turn in it. That same milestone list records the acquisition of Watkins New Zealand Ltd in 1998. Watkins is where John McCullough did a day of school work experience at 15, became production manager at 24 and general manager at 29, and where he stayed until he was 39, having overseen the company's sale to Brierley Investments. He left in 1996 to start Egmont. Two years later the firm he learned the trade at was bought by the group he now contracts for.

The orange petunia

McCullough told 1News how imported seed actually arrives. Consignments come to the New Plymouth depository, into a bond store that operates as a transitional facility for the Ministry for Primary Industries. Local MPI officers come in almost daily to open parcels. Inspectors look at every seed under a microscope for weeds, dirt, insects and other contaminants. Anything that fails goes into a biosecurity bin, gets collected, autoclaved under steam in Auckland, and deep buried.

He described it as a high trust model and said they instruct overseas suppliers up front: was the crop inspected during the growing season, was it free of a given disease or insect, was it chemically treated, at what rate, and with which active ingredients.

Then he told this story.

A Japanese supplier sold them a beautiful orange petunia. There had been no orange petunia before. Egmont sold it from Cape Reinga to Invercargill. Then they were notified that it was a genetically modified organism, prohibited in New Zealand.

Their batch tracking let them identify every packet sold and tell every buyer how to destroy their plants. McCullough was confident the recall was thorough, and pointed out that petunia is a soft annual that would not survive a hard winter anyway. He called it a good one for it to happen to.

He is not hiding any of this. He volunteered it to a television reporter. But sit with what it describes. A genetically modified flower, prohibited here, crossed the border, passed inspection, and was sold the length of the country before anyone noticed. The system caught it eventually, from overseas notification rather than from the microscope.

What Egmont says about itself

Two lines from their own website are worth more than any amount of speculation.

Their About page says what makes them different is a range including F1 hybrid varieties that offer more predictable results in growth and yield. That is the pitch, stated plainly.

Their FAQ says some of their seeds are chemically treated, because they are not allowed into New Zealand unless they meet MPI requirements, and that all chemically treated seed is identified on its packaging.

Both of those are more forthcoming than most of the industry manages. Neither is something you would guess from a seed packet.

Their FAQ also explains F1 hybrids, and in doing so explains the business. You can save seed from an F1 hybrid and it will grow, they say, but as with open pollinated seed the height, colour and other characteristics may vary. F1 hybrids offer consistent results in those traits.

Which is a polite way of saying that if you want the same plant next year, you buy the packet again.

Why this matters more than it sounds

None of this makes Egmont the villain. It is a family business in Taranaki that survived on service and got good at a hard job, and its owner talks about the work with obvious pleasure. At 68 he told 1News he still gets to work at half past five in the morning and cannot wait to get there.

The point is not that anyone is doing wrong. The point is that the seed rack presents choice, and most of that choice resolves back to a small number of the same decisions, made a long way from the shop.

Compare that to what a few people here are doing. Kōanga, Setha's, Sentinels Group and the Heritage Food Crops Research Trust all grow seed in this country and will tell you exactly how. Kōanga sells only open pollinated seed, so you can save your own. Setha's grows every line in its catalogue in Hawke's Bay. Sentinels Group pledges some of its varieties open source through the Open Source Seed Initiative, which means anyone can do anything with them as long as they do not patent them or stop anyone else. The Heritage Food Crops Research Trust will post you tomato seed for a stamp.

That is not a bigger market. It is a different proposition about whether a seed is something you buy once or something you buy every year.

Both are on sale this spring. Only one of them tells you which it is.

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