Food System

When NZ Stopped Canning Its Own Peaches

Hawke's Bay orchardists are pulling peach trees out of the ground after Wattie's cut their contracts. Behind it: Chinese dumping, Kraft Heinz's global logic, a trade relationship NZ can't afford to challenge, and what happens when food processing infrastructure disappears for good.

Luke Nicholas

— 6 min read
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When NZ Stopped Canning Its Own Peaches
Photo by Ian Baldwin / Unsplash

There is a can of peaches on the supermarket shelf. The label says peaches in juice. It does not say much else.

It does not tell you that the company which canned those peaches in Hawke's Bay — using fruit grown by families who had supplied that same factory for generations — has pulled back. That around twenty orchards are removing their trees. That the peaches in that can almost certainly came from China, sold into NZ at a price local growers cannot get anywhere near.

And that the infrastructure which made locally grown, locally canned peaches possible is being systematically disassembled — piece by piece, decision by decision — in a way that will be almost impossible to reverse.

This is not a story about one fruit. It is a story about how a food system loses the ability to feed itself.

The ownership structure first

Wattie's has been canning fruit and vegetables in Hawke's Bay since 1934, when Jim Wattie and Harold Carr started J. Wattie Canneries in a rented cottage in Hastings. Wattie's founding instinct was itself a food sovereignty story: he saw that surplus Hawke's Bay fruit was rotting on the ground and set out to process it locally rather than let Auckland businesses import from overseas. The company grew from that cottage into the Southern Hemisphere's largest canning facility, producing 172 million cans annually at its peak.

In 1992, H.J. Heinz purchased Wattie's for NZ$565 million. Heinz later merged with Kraft to become Kraft Heinz — one of the largest food conglomerates in the world, headquartered in Chicago and Pittsburgh, marketing brands in more than 170 countries.

That ownership change matters. Not because Kraft Heinz is uniquely villainous, but because the logic of a multinational food company is fundamentally different from the logic of a regional cannery. When the numbers don't work locally, a global company has options a local company doesn't. It can source from its cheapest available supplier anywhere on earth. It can exit a category entirely. It can restructure and move on. A Hastings cannery cannot do any of those things.

The sequence that unravelled it

In early 2023, Cyclone Gabrielle hit Hawke's Bay. Orchards were damaged. Wattie's domestic peach supply dropped sharply. The gap that opened was filled by imported canned peaches from China — and once Chinese product was on the shelf at a lower price, it stayed.

The volume shift is striking. Preserved peach imports from China rose from around 300,000kg per quarter in 2018 to over 800,000kg by late 2024. NZ consumers, under genuine cost-of-living pressure, reached for the cheaper can. The market share Wattie's lost during the cyclone disruption never fully returned.

In September 2025, around twenty Hawke's Bay orchardists received termination letters from Wattie's. Some had been supplying the company for decades. For Dave Mackie at Cedar Wood Orchard, the peach contract was not just about peaches — it was early-season cash flow that financed the rest of his harvest year. His family had supplied Wattie's for two generations.

The trees are coming out.

The trap built into the rules

The legal mechanism to deal with dumping exists. It is called an anti-dumping duty. NZ has used it on peaches from Spain, Greece and South Africa. The problem is that those countries do not buy a third of everything NZ exports.

China does.

The peach dumping story has a longer history than most coverage suggests, and it is worth telling in full because it shows exactly how the trap works.

Anti-dumping duties were first imposed on preserved Chinese peaches in 2006. They were lifted in 2017 following a sunset review. Wattie's challenged that decision in the High Court, which ordered MBIE to reconsider. MBIE reconsidered in 2019 and concluded that, even accounting for the court's concerns, duties were still not warranted. Wattie's applied again in 2022. MBIE found that Chinese peaches were indeed being dumped — at a weighted average margin of 4.3% — but concluded the dumping was not causing material injury to the domestic industry. No duties were imposed. That investigation concluded in June 2023.

Wattie's filed again in July 2025. This time the investigation confirmed dumping causing material injury, and a duty of 17.78% was proposed in February 2026.

That is four separate cycles of investigation, challenge, and inconclusion across nearly twenty years. While the wheels turned, the imports kept rising.

But the deeper problem sits beneath the process itself. There is a clause embedded in the NZ-China Free Trade Agreement — Article 62 — that requires NZ to notify China as soon as it accepts a properly documented dumping application. We have to tell them. Before the investigation begins. China is written into the process.

What happens when China is notified has already been demonstrated — not with peaches, but with steel.

In 2016, NZ Steel lodged a complaint with MBIE alleging Chinese galvanised steel was being dumped into the NZ market. MBIE found sufficient evidence to investigate. Chinese officials then approached Zespri — NZ's kiwifruit exporter — warning of potential retaliatory measures against NZ dairy, wool and kiwifruit exports if the investigation proceeded. The then Trade Minister Todd McClay initially denied any such threats existed. He subsequently admitted he had known about the approach to Zespri for months.

MBIE investigated the steel complaint. Then concluded Chinese subsidies were not significant enough to merit action. The complaint went nowhere.

The message was received. When China is the subject of a dumping complaint, consequences can ripple far beyond the product in question. NZ exports roughly $20 billion in goods to China annually — dairy, meat, logs, seafood, kiwifruit. The entire NZ peach canning industry is a fraction of that. No government, of any political stripe, is going to risk a trade confrontation with Beijing over a can of peaches in a Hawke's Bay supermarket.

This is not a criticism of any particular minister. It is a structural reality. A small, export-dependent country with a highly concentrated trade relationship has very limited leverage when its largest customer is also the source of the dumped goods causing harm at home. The problem cannot be solved at the level of any individual investigation. It is built into the architecture of the relationship itself.

And so the peach growers pull out their trees. The wheels of the process turn. And the answer, as it has been before, will quite possibly come back as: not enough to act on.

The peach is not the whole story

Wattie's did not stop with peaches. The company subsequently reduced contracts for local tomatoes, beetroot and corn. Then in March 2026 came the fuller picture: Wattie's proposed ceasing frozen vegetable production entirely, closing factories in Christchurch, Auckland and Dunedin, and cutting around 350 jobs and approximately 220 growers in Canterbury alone. On 27 March 2026 the company confirmed it would go ahead.

Around the same time, McCain Foods announced it was also exiting vegetable processing in Hastings.

Two of the three major processors of NZ-grown vegetables, gone within months of each other.

Vegetables NZ put it plainly: if growers do not have reliable markets, they stop growing. And in a world where supply chains are increasingly disrupted and freight costs fluctuate, a country that has dismantled its domestic processing infrastructure has made itself dependent on systems it cannot control. Production consolidates to the cheapest global source. At NZ's scale, we cannot compete on price with industrial-scale food economies. Once the infrastructure is gone, rebuilding it requires a massive, coordinated commitment that no one is currently making.

A note on apricots — and what the template looks like

This story has a precedent that barely registered at the time.

The Roxdale cannery in Roxburgh, Central Otago, closed in the early 2000s. When it closed, there was no replacement processor. NZ apricots have not been commercially canned in this country since. The growing country still exists — Central Otago remains some of the finest stone fruit terrain in the world — but the processing link in the chain is simply gone. The fruit goes fresh, or exported, or to waste.

Nobody rebuilt the Roxburgh cannery. Nobody will. The economics of rebuilding processing infrastructure from scratch, against the backdrop of cheap imported alternatives, make it essentially impossible to justify.

That is the template. Once the cannery closes, it does not come back. The orchards follow the processor. The knowledge, the varieties, the generational relationships between growers and the factory — these do not reassemble easily once dispersed.

The bigger question

The UN's Sustainable Development Goal 2 — Zero Hunger — is explicitly about building resilient food systems, ensuring countries maintain the capacity to feed themselves, and protecting the agricultural infrastructure that underpins food security. NZ is a signatory. We export food to the world. We are also quietly, steadily losing the infrastructure that would allow us to feed ourselves if the global supply chains we have come to depend on were ever disrupted.

That is a longer conversation — one worth returning to. But it starts here, with a can of peaches on a shelf, and a Hawke's Bay orchard pulling out trees that took years to grow.

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