The Asian Lily V27 has set sail from Tauranga for Japan with more than 2000 pallets of Zespri Green Kiwifruit, headed for the ports of Tokyo and Kobe.

This is the last of the 67 charter vessels for the 2016 New Zealand kiwifruit season, which has broken records with volumes of Zespri SunGold Kiwifruit up 68 per cent from last season to 46 million trays, as vines come into full production.

Zespri chief operating officer Simon Limmer says every season brings its challenges and people have worked incredibly hard across the industry to deliver another strong result. 'The industry investment in infrastructure has meant that the increased SunGold volumes have been processed well this season.

'Zespri's in-market teams are driving sales for the last few weeks of the New Zealand sales season and the first sales of our Northern Hemisphere-grown SunGold are underway in Europe, with product on the water to Asia,” says Simon.

Zespri sources premium quality kiwifruit from Northern Hemisphere orchards to supply the market for the few months of the year when New Zealand-grown kiwifruit is not available.

'We're on track to more than double sales revenue from nearly $2 billion last season to $4.5 billion by 2025.”

The forecast volumes for 2016 NZ season are 80 million trays of green, 45 million trays of SunGold and 3.8 million trays of organic green. Going into the Zespri Global Supply season, the volumes are forecast around 10.5 million trays of Zespri Green and six million trays of gold (SunGold and Gold) from Zespri's Northern Hemisphere supplying orchards.