30 years of growing together: celebrating The New Zealand Blackcurrant Co-operative
Thirty years is a milestone to cheer about for any New Zealand business. For a grower-owned cooperative that has navigated changing markets, the sudden loss of a major customer and the challenge of competing from a small corner of the global blackcurrant industry, it is particularly worth celebrating.
This year, Cooperative Business New Zealand member The New Zealand Blackcurrant Co-operative celebrates its 30th birthday.
The milestone is also a fitting example of something our New Zealand Cooperative Economy Report 2025 found at a much larger scale. Currently registered New Zealand cooperatives average around 52 years old, compared with just over 11 years for limited companies, meaning co-ops endure almost five times longer on average.
That longevity does not come from standing still. The story of the NZ Blackcurrant Co-operative is one of growers working collectively to adapt when circumstances change.
From commodity crop to high-value ingredient
New Zealand's blackcurrant industry has experienced its share of boom and bust. One of its biggest tests came in 2016, when a major buyer purchasing a substantial proportion of the country's crop withdrew from the New Zealand market. The impact flowed through grower numbers, crop volumes and confidence in the industry, leaving the Co-op with the challenge of finding new markets and new sources of value.
It responded by looking differently at what its growers were producing.
Rather than positioning blackcurrants primarily as an ingredient for familiar products such as juice and jam, the Co-op increasingly focused on the distinctive characteristics of New Zealand-grown fruit and the opportunity to compete in higher-value health and nutrition markets. That strategy has been supported by investment in scientific research, product development and international market development.
The science provides an interesting point of difference. New Zealand blackcurrants contain particularly high levels of anthocyanins, the naturally occurring compounds responsible for their deep purple colour. Research with Plant & Food Research has explored their potential in areas including exercise performance and recovery, immunity and other aspects of health and wellbeing.
That work helped create the Co-op's ADAPTIVE™ proposition, developed with Plant & Food Research to connect New Zealand-grown blackcurrant ingredients with science-backed benefits. It has helped open conversations with food and health-product manufacturers in markets including Japan and the United States.
Small crop, global ambition
The sheer scale of the challenge makes that strategy particularly interesting. CEO Kevin Parish recently described New Zealand as a very small producer by global standards, with around 5,000 metric tonnes grown last season and competition from much larger producing regions, particularly Europe and Poland. Most production is centred between Christchurch and Timaru, with a couple of growers in the Tasman region.
Competing simply on volume is therefore difficult. The opportunity is to extract more value from what New Zealand growers produce.
That is now entering another phase. The Co-op is investing alongside government through the Primary Sector Growth Fund in a three-year value-extraction project aimed at accelerating development of higher-value blackcurrant ingredients and reducing exposure to global commodity cycles.
One focus is anthocyanin-rich extract powder for functional ingredient markets, including sports nutrition. The project aims to turn what would otherwise flow into lower-value products into an additional revenue stream, while bringing production of the extract powder back to New Zealand. The Co-op is also taking that proposition directly to international markets, including Japan.
It is a very New Zealand challenge: how does a relatively small primary industry compete internationally when it cannot win on scale? In this case, the answer increasingly lies in science, differentiation, intellectual property, market development and capturing more value before the product leaves New Zealand.
And cooperation makes it possible for individual growers to tackle those challenges collectively.
Thirty years of cooperative resilience
Many people have contributed to the Co-op's first 30 years. Among them is former Chair and founding shareholder John Tavendale ONZM, who joined the Board in 2004 and became Chair in 2011. His leadership through the disruption following the loss of the Co-op's major customer in 2016 was recognised with Cooperative Business New Zealand's Lifetime Achievement Award in 2024.
But the anniversary really belongs to the generations of growers, directors, employees, researchers and partners who have collectively built and rebuilt the organisation over three decades.
That is perhaps what makes the milestone especially relevant to the wider cooperative sector.
Our Cooperative Economy Report 2025 describes longevity as an "endurance dividend". New Zealand's co-ops do not simply survive longer. Over time they accumulate knowledge, relationships and capability, while giving members a structure through which they can respond collectively to challenges that would be much harder to tackle alone. Across New Zealand, the top 30 co-ops and mutuals now generate revenues equivalent to around 12.5% of GDP.
The NZ Blackcurrant Co-operative's first 30 years contained plenty of that endurance. A major market disappeared. Consumer expectations changed. Commodity markets moved. New science created new possibilities. The Co-op adapted with them.
Today it represents around 65 to 70 percent of New Zealand's blackcurrant harvest and is looking beyond simply selling more fruit towards creating more value from every crop its members grow.
Thirty years after growers came together, that shared endeavour continues: New Zealand growers collectively taking a small crop from Canterbury and Tasman and finding ways for it to compete in some of the world's most sophisticated food, health and nutrition markets.
Congratulations to everyone at The New Zealand Blackcurrant Co-operative, past and present, on 30 years of cooperation, resilience and innovation. Here's to the next 30!
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