Most NZ exporters struggle to find buyers, Hawk Technology has the opposite problem

Demand is now the constraint

Most New Zealand manufacturers spend years chasing a market. Hawk Technology has the opposite problem. The Hastings firm’s Gen 5 Apple Packer has already put 50 machines into Washington State apple packhouses, with another 250 on order, and it cannot build them fast enough.

“The American market’s about seven times the size of New Zealand for apples only,” general manager Sam Combs told RNZ. “Washington’s the Hawke’s Bay equivalent of New Zealand and grows about two-thirds of the fruit. So we’ve gone and focused on that area. And yeah, the demand at this stage is greater than our manufacturing capability.”

That last line is the whole story. This is not a startup pitching a prototype. It is a proven product with a validated export customer base and a capacity ceiling. For a country that talks endlessly about lifting productivity and moving up the value chain, this is exactly the kind of high-IP export it keeps saying it wants.

What the machine actually does

The Gen 5 Apple Packer uses 15 AI cameras simultaneously to inspect fruit, spot defects, and sort apples by colour and quality into cardboard trays. Combs says the real intellectual property is in how the fruit is handled so it “presents stem and calyx to the cameras” for accurate defect detection.

The origin is unglamorous and very Hawke’s Bay. The business grew out of a recycling operation run by Combs’ grandfather, moved into manufacturing cardboard fruit trays, then followed customer requests for automation into denesters, inserters and, eventually, a fifth-generation packing robot. The company built a few hundred machines for the domestic market before the US opportunity opened up.

Crucially, all of it is done in Hastings. “We’ve got a full design team in-house. We’ve got fabrication in-house, and electricals in-house,” Combs said. “A big philosophy of ours is just keeping everything here.”

The jobs story that runs the other way

Automation usually arrives wrapped in fear about lost jobs. The evidence here points the other direction. Seven years ago Hawk had just two R&D staff. It now employs more than 50.

Senior mechatronics engineer Ben Kloosterman, who works on the Gen 5 machine, said the appeal is being at the frontier rather than 20 years behind it. “Being free to learn and grow in that cutting edge technology is really really cool.”

The robots are filling gaps, not creating them. In New Zealand, Combs noted, “it was a real problem for our customers to even find that labour in the first place, so it’s there to complement their existing workforces.” Alan McDonald of the Employers and Manufacturers Association backed that up, saying that with AI “there’s displacement, re-training and different skills required, but more or less the same numbers are retained in the workplace.”

Why the home market mattered

New Zealand gave Hawk a real test bed before it went global. The country produced 575,214 tonnes of apples in 2024 and, more importantly, punches well above its weight as an exporter, ranking fifth of 97 countries with shipments worth US$597.2 million, up 12.2% year-on-year. A serious domestic apple sector meant a demanding local customer base to prove the machine on.

Hawk is also competing on its own turf against imports. New Zealand brought in fruit and nut preparation machinery worth $3.68 million in 2024, led by China and Italy. Beating that competition at home while exporting the same category to the US is the harder, more valuable trick.

The tariff footnote

There is one live cost. New Zealand faces a 12.5% tariff on goods exported to the US, on top of the roughly $14 billion of goods it ships there each year, as RNZ’s Corin Dann analysed in July 2026. How capital equipment is classified will determine the hit, and the 250-unit order book suggests it has not dented appetite. But it is a margin question the company has to manage as it scales.

What happens next

There is a clear precedent for where this could go. Tauranga’s Robotics Plus, whose Aporo packer had packed a billion pieces of fruit by late 2023, was acquired by Yamaha Motor in April 2025, keeping 130 staff in New Zealand. International capital clearly wants NZ-developed agritech IP.

Hawk’s next move is stone fruit, which Combs called “an obvious kind of next cab off the ranks.” More delicate produce, similar labour crunch, same core technology. The question for Hawk is no longer whether the market exists. It is whether a Hastings factory can build machines fast enough to own it before someone else does.

Sources

• US demand for apple industry robotics driving change at Hawke’s Bay manufacturer (2026-07-29)
• Apples Price in New Zealand – June 2026 Market Prices (2026-06)
• What do the US tariffs mean for NZ? — Afternoons (2026-07-24)
• New Zealand Machinery for the preparation of fruits, nuts imports by country 2024 (2024)
• Yamaha acquires NZ’s Robotics Plus, boosting agricultural automation (2025-04-19)
• Robo packer hits a billion (2023-12-08)