It’ll be up to others to make the premium cider that potentially creates a billion-dollar industry for New Zealand.

Allan White’s job is the apples.

“Are you familiar with my background,’’ White asked, over a glass of single-varietal cider he recently pitched to nurserymen, growers and cider makers in Normandy. “I used to be the apple breeder and pear breeder down at Plant & Food Research and I was responsible for Jazz and Envy and Rockit and Dazzle and whatever else you want to name,’’ said White.

“So I retired about five years ago. Three years ago I get a phone call from a guy called John Powell.’’ Powell is in the cider business and, together, the pair formed a company called Cider Apples New Zealand Limited.

Now, with the help of the Ministry for Primary Industries, AGMARDT, the Fruit Wine and Cider Makers Association of New Zealand, Prevar and Plant & Food Research, they’ve prepared a roadmap for how this could become a substantial export earner over the next 15 years.

Cider has a stigma that makers and marketers are going to have to overcome for these dreams to become a reality.

For White, this is about apples and an industry that could do with some assistance in Hawke’s Bay and around the country. He’s already identified existing varieties with the characteristics to elevate cider from the product we currently see on our supermarket shelves, with a handful of other apples in an advanced stage of development.

The challenge now is growing them at a scale to generate the yields necessary to make this the business it could be. White’s banking on the motivation simply coming down to dollars and cents.

“Nurserymen, like everyone else in the fresh fruit industry, are really concerned about what they’re going to do because their books are empty. The world fresh apple market’s in a crisis,’’ White said, from his semi-rural property.

“[The orchard] next door is flattened. The one across is flattened. We drive around Hawke’s Bay and orchards are flattened and it’s not because of Cyclone Gabrielle. “It’s because the varieties that we’re growing are not economic anymore so you can’t make money.’’

That’s not something you’ll hear a lot of growers say out loud.

“You’ve been around journalism long enough to know that there are stories the industry want told and stories the industry doesn’t want told,’’ said White. “But the reality is we are losing huge areas of land in orchards simply because they’re uneconomic.’’

That’s where cider could be a saviour.

“The value chain analysis shows that the economics of growing cider apples is very, very attractive because you reduce your inputs dramatically. You can mechanise – so you get rid of the headache of labour – you can mechanically thin, you can mechanically prune,’’ White said.

“All these labour-saving possibilities are far easier to implement in a cider orchard than they are in a fresh apple orchard because the product doesn’t have to be beautiful or perfect.

“If you’re thinning, for example, you just worry about crop load, so you get a return crop every year. You’re not worried about spacing the fruit so you get good colouration and all that sort of thing, you’re just worried about crop load. You can just go through and harvest 100% of your fruit.’’

The roadmap works on the notion that growers can halve their costs and get $1 per kilo for their fruit. “We estimate that in 15 years there could be 2500 hectares of cider apples. There are currently 9000 hectares of eating apples, at best. We’re down from 11,000 already,’’ said White.

“You can make cider using wine making equipment. The process of making the cider is exactly the same as the process of making white wine. “So it’s not only the apple industry that’s needing a bit of light at the end of the tunnel, the grape wine industry is also needing some.

“If you work through that, as we have in our exercise, wine makers use their equipment for, at best, six weeks of the year, so they have a huge amount of capital sitting there doing nothing

“They can make a whole lot of economies by extending the use of their capital equipment by engaging in cider making. The stainless steel’s the same, the process is the same and in, fact, most cider makers use wine yeast to make their cider.’’

The cider rolled out for BayBuzz by White was similar to sparkling wine, but nicer. The kind of drink, at 6% alcohol, that’s an enjoyable alternative to beer or RTDs, but could appeal to wine enthusiasts as well.

White realises there are people that will never fancy cider, despite the burgeoning markets for a premium product that he insists exist in the United States, Australia, the United Kingdom and Europe.

Which is why he always comes back to what’s in it for growers.The cider apples he’s working with, and developing, yield 95% juice, compared to the 70% in traditional varieties. Fresh juice then sells for about 70 cents a litre.

It’s all about getting the most value out of every apple.

“You can get a hundred tonnes per hectare of it in total. We’ve used 80 in our calculations,’’ White said. “The export crop for New Zealand averages around about 70 tonnes per hectare for all export orchards, but the orchards are producing 100 tonnes of fruit. It’s just that 30 tonnes doesn’t get into the export cartons. For cider, you can put it all in cider barrels.’’

It remains to be seen if the roadmap paves out the way it’s designed to.

But, for White, it’s already been an invigorating and unexpected journey into a variety of apples and an industry he’d never considered.

“The number of sceptics that have not bought into the dream are few and far between because it’s one of those fantastic ideas that’s so obvious. It’s been smacking us in the face for years,’’ he said.

Public Interest Journalism funded through NZ On Air