PA C K A G I N G
KIWI FRUIT BOX INSPIRES
AUSSIE INDUSTRY
A cardboard box developed in a
Northern Territory shed with inspiration
from New Zealand has won its
developer an innovation award. David
Hoseason-Smith has been honoured
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FT501
24 AUGUST 2018
at the Northern Australia Food
Futures conference for his unique
box, designed for the mango industry
in the early 2000s and credited with
transforming Australia’s fruit and
vegetable packaging. The Darwin local
– working as manager for packaging
company Amcor - was having trouble
with boxes that were weak, sagged
at the bottom and made the fruit flat
way before they got to Sydney or
Melbourne, as well as labour-intensive
as every box was hand-directed by a
team of casual workers. A visit from a
local mango farmer with a box sourced
from New Zealand changed all that.
“He threw it on my desk and said ‘can
we make this?’,” Hoseason-Smith
says. Embarking on a fact-finding
mission over the Tasman – including
a trip to a box factory in Hastings – he
knew the Kiwi boxes were the answer
to his problem. “And to cut a long
story short, we bought two machines
to Darwin and developed the box
here as a one-piece box with a lid on
it, so that’s how it started.” But the
Kiwi boxes struggled with the Top
End conditions. “They’ve got much
cooler conditions in New Zealand
and their box-style doesn’t have to
be as vigorous, so we actually had to
develop a new box that was right for
the Northern Territory,” Hoseason-
Smith says. Gathering all his packaging
engineers, he redesigned the fold of
the box to make it stronger and able
to be stacked in columns on pallets.
Paper technologists then developed
‘functionally coated papers’ which had
a thin plastic membrane laminated
between two pieces of paper to act as
a moisture barrier. Now manufactured
overseas or at facilities in Sydney,
Adelaide or Brisbane, the flat boxes
arrive in Darwin and are put through
erecting machines located across the
Top End before being transported to
customers. “The open-tray box which
we developed is now the major box
used for tray-fruit across Australia
from apples to pears, plums, peaches,
avocadoes and mangoes of course,”
Hoseason-Smith says. “Every box
in Australia now is an open-tray box
because of the work we did here in
the Northern Territory. If it wasn’t
for this particular box, I don’t think
we’d be sending 4.8 million trays of
mangoes out of the Northern Territory.
If we were using technology from
years ago, every piece of fruit would
be bruised or damaged and rejected
in the marketplace. So basically it’s
allowed fruit to travel from here to
the markets down south, it can go
anywhere around the world which has
opened up markets because it allows
fruit to get there in good condition.”
Hoseason-Smith still works in the
packaging industry, which he says
is constantly changing, with people
coming up with ideas to improve the
paddock-to-plate process.
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