A sea of Pink Lady apples bobbing in water along the automated sizing line at Redland Premium Fruit facility in Mooroopna
One of the Goulburn Valley’s largest fruit growing and packing enterprises, which employs hundreds of people, has been sold to a national agricultural company.
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Redland Premium Fruit completed the purchase of the assets of the Geoffrey Thompson Holdings Ltd in late September.
The acquisition of the 75-year-old company is a milestone for Redland as part of the group’s vertical integration strategy.
Australian-owned Redland has a significant portfolio of farms across regional Australia and is currently growing citrus, apples, table grapes, stone fruit and kiwifruit in Queensland, NSW, Victoria and Western Australia.
The business is a subsidiary of the Argyle investment group, based in Brisbane.
The acquisition includes the Mooroopna coolstore and pack-house in the former Ardmona Fruit Products building in Young St, which was modernised in a multi-million-dollar upgrade by the former Geoffrey Thompson business. This site now packs up to about 100 tonnes of fruit on an average day.
The site includes an automatic storage retrieval system which will hold up to 5200 bins of fruit, stacked 26 high. The air-tight tower, one of the largest in Australia, is completely automated and feeds bins into an automated packing line.
Thousands of bins of fruit can be stored in the autotmated retrieval system at Redland Premium Fruit in Mooroopna. Only robots operate in the dark and cold atmosphere of the tower.
The business now comprises growing, processing, storing, logistics, marketing and sales of produce to Australian and international markets.
Redland director Hugh Esler said they were excited to have made an investment into the Goulburn Valley region and by the potential of the Mooroopna and Shepparton processing sites to service both domestic and export fresh fruit markets.
“There has been significant capital investment into the Mooroopna facility in particular and we look forward to completing the various works that are under way as well as undertaking a number of other projects to allow us to maximise the potential of the recently commissioned state-of-the-art automation technology,” Mr Esler said.
“In addition to processing and selling Redland-grown fruit, we expect to service third-party growers as we demonstrate the efficiency of the new facility and expertise of our new sales team.
“After a number of difficult growing seasons, we’re hoping we can help local growers to maximise their returns into the future.
“This business will be set up for the long term and will be making decisions on that basis.”
Redland has taken on more than 200 staff from the Geoffrey Thompson group over the past two weeks and, as they scale up, they expect to employ more.
One of the older packing lines at Redland Premium Fruit in Mooroopna
Redland managing director Tony Tremlett said Redland needed a processing facility and Shepparton was a great spot with a strong industrial base, on the freight route to Melbourne and with a capacity to process pome fruit and citrus.
“It’s a facility that can run 365 days of the year. This can underpin a successful business operation,” he said.
Mr Tremlett said it would be used to pack not only their own fruit but they were looking to extend the capacity to outside growers.
The market will be seeing more of the Redland name.
The old and the new — automated lines run alongside the traditional people-powered fruit packing lines.
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