Golden kiwis are a pricey kiwi variety known for their yellow flesh and sweet taste. Created by Zespri, New Zealand's kiwifruit cooperative, golden kiwis saved the island nation's local kiwi industry after a disease destroyed most of its kiwi orchards back in 2010. Despite costing nearly twice as much as standard green kiwis, golden kiwis have proven more popular — and more profitable. Zespri's SunGold kiwi strain is so valuable that its sprouts have been smuggled overseas and sold in lots for 60,000 New Zealand dollars. But how can a fruit be under copyright? And what makes this particular kiwi so expensive?
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00:00 [MUSIC PLAYING]
00:03 This is a golden kiwi, a unique strain of kiwi fruit
00:08 developed through crossbreeding to be
00:11 sweeter and softer than a normal green kiwi.
00:15 Green's old school.
00:16 Green is big, brown, very different sorts of shapes.
00:22 Gold just looks slicker.
00:24 It's a different, more subtle palette, sweeter,
00:27 and it's a more consistent piece of fruit.
00:30 Even though they're smaller, golden kiwis
00:32 cost almost twice as much as green kiwis.
00:35 In fact, they're so valuable that some sprouts
00:38 have been smuggled out of New Zealand
00:40 and sold in lots for $60,000 New Zealand dollars.
00:44 That's because this specific kiwi
00:46 can't be grown without permission
00:48 from its copyright holder, Zespri.
00:51 Unless you want to be sued and ordered
00:53 to pay $14 million, like one international smuggler was,
00:57 growing golden kiwis is so lucrative
00:59 that it's caused a feud between New Zealand and China
01:02 where the fruit is native.
01:04 But how do you copyright a fruit?
01:07 And what exactly makes these kiwis so expensive?
01:11 It's a very easy fruit to eat.
01:16 It's very soft, without being squashy or squishy.
01:21 Yeah, it's got the hints of melon with it,
01:24 with the kiwi fruit.
01:25 Look, it's a beautiful-tasting fruit.
01:28 It really is.
01:29 While green kiwis have a thick, hairy skin
01:32 that provides a protective layer,
01:34 golden kiwis are completely hairless
01:37 and much more easily damaged.
01:39 Here at Wairoa Orchard, located in Kerikeri
01:43 in the heart of Northland, New Zealand,
01:46 golden kiwis are carefully harvested with gloved hands.
01:50 This drives up labor costs.
01:52 It's a very easy fruit to pick,
01:54 but you must take a lot of care not to damage it.
01:57 We have teams of pickers that have picking bags
02:02 and wear gloves on their hands
02:04 so that they don't damage the fruit with their fingernails.
02:07 And it's all done by hand, by snapping the fruit off
02:11 and putting it into a bag,
02:12 and then the bags are emptied into bins.
02:15 A team of 15 pickers, when they're doing well,
02:18 they would be filling a bin roughly
02:20 every three to four minutes.
02:22 But before Peter and his team
02:24 are even allowed to harvest,
02:26 a sample from the orchard must meet certain criteria.
02:30 Taste is one, number of seeds,
02:37 or the color of the seeds, the blackness of the seeds.
02:40 You can't just have one or two
02:42 or three out of the five pass, or whatever it is.
02:44 You must pass on all of them.
02:46 This is because this particular variety
02:49 of golden kiwi, called sun gold,
02:51 is controlled by Zespri,
02:53 a cooperative of kiwi fruit growers in New Zealand.
02:56 Zespri created sun gold
03:02 by crossbreeding different yellow kiwis.
03:05 Within two years, it was a delicious, large, golden globe.
03:10 And it was just a perfect piece of fruit.
03:13 And it was this perfected strain
03:15 that helped New Zealand rebuild its kiwi industry.
03:19 In 2010, disease nearly wiped out
03:22 most of the country's kiwi orchards,
03:24 causing $900 million worth of damage.
03:27 But one newly developed kiwi strain
03:30 resisted infection, Zespri's sun gold.
03:33 Sun gold quickly became popular
03:36 for its consistently sweet taste,
03:39 and has proved more profitable than its green counterpart.
03:42 Fast forward to today,
03:44 and this perfected strain makes up about 67%
03:48 or $1.9 billion of New Zealand's kiwi export value.
03:53 But not just anyone can grow these kiwis.
03:56 Zespri only releases a certain number of licenses
03:59 every year, and growers bid on them.
04:01 In 2022, the median price for a sun gold license
04:05 hit $801,000 per hectare.
04:09 We have IP protections around who's able to grow it
04:12 and who shouldn't be growing it.
04:14 And gold kiwi fruit is, it's a handcrafted product.
04:18 Yeah, we grow it in nature, but so many hours go into it.
04:22 They get touched so much,
04:23 and whether it be fertilization, pruning,
04:27 tying down the pruning wood, thinning flowers,
04:32 it just needs so much attention.
04:34 But golden kiwis weren't always this perfect.
04:38 When they first hit New Zealand's produce market
04:40 10 years ago, the fruits looked
04:42 and tasted a lot different.
04:45 That fruit was disgusting.
04:46 They were these small, hard bullets.
04:50 It was right at the start of when we'd started growing it
04:53 on scale as a country.
04:55 And like all new bits of fruit,
04:57 you need to figure out how to grow it.
04:59 Today, it can take five years
05:01 before a new sun gold kiwi orchard is ready for harvest.
05:05 Joshua Murphy is in charge of planting golden kiwis
05:10 here at Wirarua Orchard,
05:12 one of the largest commercial orchards in the region.
05:15 The orchard contains about 72 hectares of gold kiwis.
05:20 It's on Joshua to strategically cultivate vines
05:24 that will bear high-quality fruit
05:26 for the next 30 to 50 years.
05:30 It's not just a kind of, we chuck the plants in the ground
05:32 and it grows a million fruit that big.
05:35 You know, no, there's actually a lot of selection.
05:37 If we over-crop it too much,
05:39 we'll get a bunch of fruit like that that aren't gonna sell.
05:41 So we have to select how many canes we put into the canopy
05:45 in the winter pruning.
05:46 Starting in June, during New Zealand's wintertime,
05:50 Joshua begins pruning the vines
05:52 and training its canes or branches to grow on a trellis
05:56 and eventually form a canopy.
05:58 Yeah, so this system that I'm doing here
06:00 with the poles and the strings,
06:02 again, it's based on a science
06:05 because these canes will grow quicker
06:09 and longer and stronger growing on that direction
06:13 rather than just leaving them flat in the wind.
06:15 Training the vines to grow upward
06:18 also forces the plants to store more sugar at the top,
06:22 resulting in sweeter kiwis.
06:25 I think it's quite nice.
06:26 My partner, she says it's like a mix
06:30 between a kiwi fruit and a tamarillo.
06:35 Yeah, they're more of a designer fruit
06:38 if that makes any sense.
06:41 The green ones are quite nice too,
06:42 but the gold ones have just got that extra bit in them.
06:45 I'll eat a few each season, but I won't,
06:48 I don't indulge myself in them too much now.
06:52 I make desserts out of them.
06:53 A golden kiwi orchard typically needs more hands on deck
06:57 because of its large size.
06:59 Since golden kiwi vines produce less fruit,
07:02 the orchards are usually larger than those for green kiwis.
07:06 A typical green kiwi orchard might have
07:08 12,000 to 14,000 trees per hectare.
07:11 Meanwhile, a golden kiwi orchard needs
07:14 16,000 to 18,000 trees per hectare
07:18 to produce enough fruit to make it worth it for farmers.
07:21 So the work I'm doing now on this plant here
07:25 gets done on about 80,000 plants in this orchard.
07:28 And this is just the very initial stage
07:30 of setting up the leaders.
07:32 Joshua strategically trims the vines
07:34 to produce these perfectly sweet golden kiwis.
07:38 Depending on the amount of growth,
07:40 it takes him anywhere from five to 20 minutes per plant.
07:44 Thinning out the vines by hand allows him to target canes
07:48 that have started to produce misshapen fruit.
07:51 Doing this also raises labor costs
07:54 since all the thinning must be done by an experienced hand.
07:58 Most people I'd say that are overseas
08:00 that are buying a kiwi fruit,
08:01 they probably think it comes from a tree.
08:03 You know, they probably think someone's just planted a tree.
08:05 I don't think a lot of people actually understand
08:08 how much labor and work goes into creating
08:11 the product that they're eating.
08:13 After the kiwis are harvested,
08:15 every kiwi is carefully inspected.
08:19 Consumers don't want to go one day in the supermarket
08:21 looking for their gold kiwi fruit
08:22 and find that it's not there anymore,
08:24 or that it tastes slightly different,
08:26 or the quality's not as good.
08:27 No one likes a blemish.
08:29 And that's, in some ways, a bit sad
08:30 because it still tastes just as nice.
08:33 But premium fruit needs to look perfect,
08:35 and gold kiwi fruit is pretty unforgiving
08:37 because it's such a smooth, round piece of fruit.
08:40 It looks beautiful.
08:41 Any mark on it, you can notice it.
08:43 Shipping from New Zealand to most countries
08:45 is already quite expensive due to the distance.
08:49 And not many ships come down here.
08:50 There isn't that much going on down in Aotearoa, New Zealand
08:53 that you need a big container ship for
08:55 outside of horticulture and dairy and meat.
08:59 Therefore, the cost of shipping, it's pretty expensive
09:02 when it comes to the contribution that it costs
09:04 to the price of a piece of fruit.
09:06 Luckily, though, golden kiwis don't expire quickly,
09:10 another quality that sets them apart from green kiwis.
09:13 Zespri says that while a ripe green kiwi
09:16 lasts up to five days, a golden kiwi can last up to seven.
09:20 The grower-owned co-op is the main exporter
09:24 of New Zealand's kiwi fruits.
09:26 Today, the island country controls
09:29 30% of the global kiwi supply.
09:32 In a way, Zespri's coordinating all those efforts
09:34 of New Zealand kiwi fruit growers
09:36 into a coordinated breeding program,
09:38 and it's one of the larger breeding programs in the world
09:40 when it comes to horticulture.
09:41 And as a result, we get these beautiful pieces of fruit.
09:45 But it is a lot of work to get to that end point
09:48 of a beautiful piece of gold kiwi fruit in the supermarket.
09:51 However, after a kiwi grower successfully smuggled
09:56 sun-gold sprouts overseas,
09:58 a number of illegal orchards popped up in China.
10:02 Zespri has attempted to regain control
10:04 of its golden kiwi strain, but it may be too late.
10:08 The smuggler was fined for $14 million in damages,
10:12 but since then, the unauthorized sun-gold orchards
10:16 have doubled in size.
10:18 Ironically, kiwis originated in China,
10:20 where they're known as gooseberries.
10:22 While other countries struggled
10:24 to commercialize the gooseberry,
10:26 New Zealand's humid climate has made it ideal
10:29 for cultivating and perfecting this unique fruit.
10:32 And now, New Zealand's golden kiwis
10:35 are still the, well, gold standard.
10:38 I actually went to Myanmar a few years ago,
10:41 which is next to Vietnam in that,
10:44 and I went in the supermarkets there
10:46 and I saw the kiwi fruit there,
10:47 and this was just after we'd finished the harvest,
10:49 you know, it had the Zespri sticker
10:50 and stuff like that on it.
10:51 So it's actually pretty cool to see
10:53 that it's an international product,
10:57 especially coming from New Zealand, you know,
10:59 if we're a little country with not much of a population
11:02 down the bottom of the earth,
11:03 we've produced some pretty good stuff.