The country's largest mushroom grower, Meadow Mushrooms, has confirmed it will cease production at its North Island base in Morrinsville and move all operations to its Canterbury base.The closure, foreshadowed in December 2008, follows an inability to mee
The country’s largest mushroom grower, Meadow Mushrooms, has confirmed it will cease production at its North Island base in Morrinsville and move all operations to its Canterbury base.
The closure, foreshadowed in December 2008, follows an inability to meet the high compliance costs put on the Morrinsville facility by the local council.
“We have made a huge investment over the past six years to keep and expand the
Morrinsville mushroom business,” chief executive Roger Young says.
“It has been in continuous operation for the past 56 years and it is with great regret that we must now close it. We are still discussing the situation with our 160 Morrinsville staff and hope to relocate some of them to Canterbury.”
The closure will occur in two stages: the compost production facility at Taukoro Rd will cease by December 31 and all mushroom growing will cease at the Avenue Rd farm by end of March 2011.
Instead, Meadow Mushrooms is redeveloping and expanding its Canterbury-based operations to absorb and expand on the production carried out in Morrinsville.
A new automated composting and mushroom spawning plant is being built near Dunsandel, in mid-Canterbury, and a new $45 million growing facility is being built at the main company base at Prebbleton, near Christchurch.
Both plants are fully enclosed, with no untreated emissions, and use latest mushroom growing technology, some imported from the Netherlands and the remainder developed in New Zealand.
The combined North and South Island farms produce 145 tonnes of mushrooms a week, with two-thirds of this coming from the Canterbury site. After the expansion is complete, production will rise to 200 tonnes a week.
Meadow Mushrooms was founded in 1968 in Cyprus by Roger Giles and Philip Burdon, who chairs the company. It moved to New Zealand in 1970 and today employs more than 500.
