For many businesses, 2021 was a wild ride, but despite the challenges, some companies shone. Popular NZ fruit tech company Hectre (pronounced Hectare) was a definite sparkler, winning at the global AgTech BreakThrough Awards and gaining a reputation for best in class among the US apple growing industry.
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It’s time to take a look under the hood to discover how this innovative company, built with buckets of “Kiwi” work ethic and a huge passion to deliver “better”, has gone on to become one of the most exciting agritech companies on the global stage.
Last week, and perhaps unsurprisingly, Hectre were named finalists in two categories at the prestigious NZ Hi-Tech Awards. How did they arrive at this point?
It all started with an apple. It was 2016 and Hectre was a team of three visionary co-founders, who upon learning of the daily struggles faced by apple growers, set out to find a better way. In consultation with a group of growers, they created the design for the Hectre Orchard Management App and importantly, growers backed them.
Simon Easton, co-owner of Wairepo Orchards, grows apples near Nelson, in NZ’s South Island, and still remembers when one of the founders, Menilik Dyer, turned up at his orchard with a large notebook and asked, “As a grower, what is it that you need that we could help with?” Easton was sick to death of writing out bin tickets – the labels that must go with each full fruit bin detailing the immense amount of origin data that growers have to capture (it’s even greater now).
Easton is a numbers man and is driven by continually improving the performance of his orchard. He wants to get his hands on data so he can hone in on what’s working well and identify opportunities to perform even better. He’s enjoyed seeing the journey of the Hectre app from those early days to where it is now. “Being able to get cost info out of Hectre is awesome. To know that picking cost me this amount and pruning cost me that amount…I just love all of that.”
“We’ve always been keen to roll up our sleeves, get alongside growers and learn everything we can from them. I think they respect the fact that we genuinely value their insights, their skills and their extraordinary commitment to what has to be one of the hardest industries to be in. When you consider that fruit growers only get one chance each year to make money (after harvest), and the rest of the time they’re slogging their guts out and pouring in funds. It takes bravery and an immense amount of care and hard work to survive and thrive. Our team is continually in awe of the growers we work with,” says Hectre Co-founder and CEO, Matty Blomfield.
In the first few years, Hectre built out the Hectre Orchard Management App, an app that enables fruit growers to digitise their orchards, removing all the double and triple handling of paper they traditionally deal with and the wasted time that goes with it. Growers can manage all their labour through the app, including auto calculation of piece rates, plus integration with payroll programs. The ability to gain insights on the performance of pickers and fruit quality, delivers direct benefits as growers continue to battle the challenges rising from the pandemic and environmental factors.