Trevelyan’s making waves with Big Little Wins campaign

Stuff.co.nz, 03/07/2020

The Kiwifruit industry in the Bay of Plenty has its challenges – labour shortages, infrastructure costs, climate change, and more. Trevelyan’s, one of New Zealand’s leading Kiwifruit packhouse, cool storage facility and orchard management services provider, believes these challenges present the perfect opportunity to reflect and continuously grow as a company. That’s why they’ve adopted the phrase ‘Big Little Wins’.

What are Big Little Wins?

The concept of ‘Big Little Wins’ is based on the idea that lots of little decisions can have a big impact. As a family-owned business, Trevelyan’s is committed to listening to its growers and putting them first every step of the way – they do this by emphasising continuous improvement, exposing and solving problems, and ensuring they are ahead of the game. In practice, this means making small changes that will have a big impact overall, especially in focus areas like workplace safety, wellness, staff support and development, sustainability, and technological innovation.

Trevelyan’s foundation rests on three organisational pillars which influence all decisions, large and small, at the business:

• Work smart
• Respect our people
• Tread lightly

By using these values as a ‘lens’ through which to look at their business, Trevelyan’s is able to identify potential improvements and find small changes that cumulatively make a big impact on the business, the growers, the environment and the community.

Big Little Wins are making big waves for Trevelyan’s

Trevelyan’s is focused on sustainability – economically, socially and environmentally. Here are some of the Big Little Wins they’ve seen over the past few years that have had massive impacts across the board:

• Running regular cross-team meetings and Problem and Opportunity processes for continuous improvement.
• Launching their new grower portal to provide kiwifruit growers with data such as flower counts, fruit counts and post-harvest information.
• Keeping staff healthy and happy with fitness classes, healthy meals, stress management, health checks and more.
• Technical transfer sharing ‘field days’ where they share knowledge and expertise with their Bay of Plenty growers.
• Making beneficial changes to their orchard management system in key areas like resource use, staff training, waste and more.
• Trialling a secondary refrigeration system to help reduce greenhouse gas emissions. In 2019 GHG emissions were reduced to 140g CO2e per class 1 tray (210g CO2e per class 1 tray in 2018).
• Repurposing fruit sticker waste (around 11 tonnes in 2019) as bedding for calves at local farms.
• Reducing the amount of waste sent to landfill in 2019 to less than 7 per cent of the total waste generated (10.4 per cent in 2018) and currently investigating recycling options for other waste streams.
• Using an electricity supplier that provides power from 98 per cent renewable sources and looking into further ways to decrease electricity consumption.

As a result of their dedication to finding Big Little Wins, Trevelyan’s is considered a New Zealand leader in sustainability – in fact, Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern recently toured their Te Puke kiwifruit packing house to thank the company and employees for working through the lockdown, helping to “keep New Zealand fed” and providing jobs for Kiwis from industries heavily affected by Covid-19 (like travel and hospitality).