Peter MacDonald
There was a time when Wattie’s stood as a proud symbol of New Zealand ingenuity and self-reliance. Founded in Hawke’s Bay in 1934 by Sir James Wattie, the company built its reputation on world-class canned fruit, vegetables and sauces grown in Kiwi soil, nurtured by Kiwi growers and trusted by Kiwi families. For decades, Hawke’s Bay peaches and apricots filled Wattie’s cans, supporting a circular economy where the land, the workers and the company thrived together.
But, just days ago, Wattie’s announced that contracts with local peach growers would end. The orchards, some of them multigenerational and still recovering from Cyclone Gabrielle’s devastating floods, will now be uprooted and bulldozed. In their place, Wattie’s will fill its cans with cheaper imported fruit. The excuse offered was the disruption caused by the floods, but growers argue it is no more than a convenient pretext for a permanent shift away from New Zealand produce.
What is lost here is more than orchards. It is a heritage of horticultural skill, a local industry that once set global standards, and a piece of New Zealand’s food sovereignty. The “clean, green, high-standard” promise that New Zealand agriculture built its reputation on is being hollowed out in favour of imported, standardised supply chains that increasingly include genetically modified crops banned on Kiwi soil, but not in the countries from which our food will soon be shipped.
To understand why, we need to look beyond Hastings. Wattie’s has not been New Zealand-owned since 1992, when the American-based H J Heinz Company bought it for $565 million. Today, it sits within Kraft Heinz, a multinational giant. And looming even larger is BlackRock, the world’s largest asset manager, which holds around seven per cent of Kraft Heinz stock.
Seven per cent may not sound like much, but here lies the quiet revolution in global capitalism. BlackRock, alongside Vanguard and State Street, holds similar stakes in nearly every major food company: Fonterra, Nestlé, PepsiCo, Coca-Cola, Unilever and more. They also hold slices of the logistics companies that ship food, the retailers that sell it and even the fertiliser firms that grow it. Through this web of ‘minority’ holdings, BlackRock exerts enormous influence. When companies face fragmented shareholder bases, a single seven per cent block sets the tone in boardrooms, guiding strategy and supply chains alike.
This is why decisions like Wattie’s pivot away from Hawke’s Bay peaches cannot be dismissed as local accidents. They are signals of a global system in which financial conglomerates value efficiency and uniformity over heritage and sovereignty. From the shipping container to the supermarket shelf, food is being reshaped by distant financial interests – and New Zealand’s orchards are collateral damage. In the relentless drive to maximise profit margins, locally owned orchards are no longer viewed as partners in production but as inefficiencies to be eliminated, the ‘hiccups’ of sovereign Kiwi growers standing in the way of corporate uniformity.
What begins with the peach will not end with the peach. If current trends continue, within a few short years much of New Zealand’s food will no longer be grown here at all, but imported, processed and standardised to meet global shareholders’ demands. And with that shift comes the likelihood of GMOs and other practices New Zealand has long resisted.
The bulldozers that will be moving through Hawke’s Bay orchards are not just ripping up trees. They are tearing at the fabric of New Zealand’s food independence. And unless we wake up to who is really making these decisions – not the growers, not even Wattie’s management – but the asset managers in New York boardrooms, this tragedy will spread from the orchards to every aisle of our supermarkets.
