Western Harvest

Our Story

Click on the button below, ‘Who We Are, and What We Do,’  to to watch a short clip on the story of Western Harvest. Enjoy!

Western Harvest was first established in the late 1980’s when the Jones family purchased 16 acres of prime river silt- peat soil mix on the beautiful Kapiti Coast of the Lower North Island.

The fashionable fruits of that era were kiwifruit & boysenberries and alongside this we also planted blackberries, passionfruit, strawberries and later, Taylors Gold and Burr Bosc pears, then finally at the request of our Australian customers, rhubarb.

As always fashion is fickle and we narrowed our selection of crops down to the highest performers which are to this day Blackberries and Rhubarb.

Blackberries

We now grow 8Ha of “thorn free” blackberries which is a variety developed by the University of California in the early 80’s.

Whilst we get high yields from this variety, it is the flavour so like the wild berry, that brings our customers back year after year for more.

The flavour of this blackberry will hold exceptionally well through fairly strenuous commercial processing and cooking.

Rhubarb

In 1995 we were approached by a major pie manufacture who were looking for frozen sliced rhubarb.

To meet the needs of this customer we planted a variety of rhubarb which was developed by the late Burt Bose of Waiuku, NZ, which we call Burts.

Much to our customer’s satisfaction, this variety has proven to have excellent colour and flavour characteristics.

What we can do

At Western Harvest the customers’ needs are paramount. We prefer to sell to the end-user and have a proven record of processing to our customers unique requirements. 

Through our knowledge of New Zealand growers and suppliers, we have the ability to source a wide range of premium frozen fruit and vegetables. 

This gives us the ability to ship 20ft or 40ft reefer containers with our own IQF blackberries or IQF Rhubarb and add, frozen kiwifruit, IQF boysenberries, IQF grated carrot, IQF strawberries, frozen diced celery, or any other New Zealand product that our customers require.