A reefer carrying 24 tonnes of fresh kiwifruit left our registered packing house in Zhouzhi County, Shaanxi, bound for the Russian market. The load came to 2,400 cartons, all of it graded and pre-cooled within twenty-four hours of loading.
Shipments like this one have become routine for us, but each still follows the same sequence, and it is worth walking through because it explains why our export programmes hold together at destination.
How this lot was assembled
Fruit comes in from cooperative blocks inside our own growing base. It is pre-cooled the same day it is picked, then runs across the sorting line for size, weight and soluble solids. Anything outside specification goes to the domestic channel, not into the export carton. Each carton receives a lot code that traces back to the orchard block, the picking date and the grower who picked it. Our full chain from orchard to port is described in more detail on our supply chain page.
Packing formats on this shipment
- Hayward green kiwifruit, 5 kg and 9 kg export cartons
- Red-flesh fruit, 6 kg cartons with twelve-unit inner trays
- Gold-flesh fruit, 9 kg cartons
Those are the formats we run most often, but carton weight, inner tray count and label language can be produced to your specification subject to volume. Buyers who need retail-ready cartons should tell us the shelf format first, because it changes how we grade.
What this means if you are planning a programme
Russia is a short-transit, high-volume destination for us, served by rail and road as well as sea. The main Zhouzhi harvest runs from September to November, but we hold fruit in controlled-atmosphere storage, so a buyer who wants to land stock in spring rather than autumn can still be served from the same season. Our export season calendar sets out the picking windows by variety.
Most of the complaints we hear about Chinese kiwi fruit come from programmes where the exporter was really a broker: fruit collected from whoever had stock, qualities mixed, and the second half of the container failing to match the first. We are a grower and a registered packer. Tell us your port and target calibre and we will quote against live availability, not against a list.
Send us your specification and we will come back with current availability and an indicative landed cost.