Rockit man

His role is to achieve the ambitious growth targets of the board. He has done despite all the challenges of the Covid pandemic.

Rockit apples are sold in 28 countries and there is a strong emphasis on sales to Asia - and China, in particular, is a major market. But in the last few months with the Chinese border closed, this has posed challenges for the company.

"We're doing okay. We have managed to airfreight a lot of our products up there, so we have good stock in China and Shanghai is slowly reopening," O'Donnell told Hort News.

"Our product is suited for the e-commerce challenge because it is already prepacked, so we are getting a little bit of help there but not that volume we used to. We have got a new sales campaign that's kicking off there and hopefully that will give us a bit of pull. It's hard to get product into China but we are getting it in despite the challenges," he says.

While the export market has its own set of challenges, back in the orchard it's also been a hard year.

O'Donnell says their orchards got hit by the weather bomb and that was a big problem. Covid was also a problem - especially with supervisory staff.

"We planned for pickers, but we didn't plan to lose managers and so we ended up with teams that had no quality control and we had to let people go home which was pretty tough," he told Hort News.

A combination of a lack of people to and Covid meant that Rockit lose up to 20% of this year's crop. This was very much in line with the losses of other apple producers.

Regardless of this, O'Donnell says Rockit is pushing ahead with its expansion programme and hopes to realise the target of producing 500 million little apples by 2026.