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LuLu Hypermarket. Photo Credit: Supplied
Silver Fern Farms has successfully produced and delivered 90 tonnes of premium chilled New Zealand lamb and beef to the United Arab Emirates via airfreight.
The move is said to demonstrate the company's ability to maintain reliable customer supply in the face of ongoing logistics challenges in the region.
The shipment was delivered using a customer-chartered aircraft operating from Auckland to Abu Dhabi, ensuring end-to-end cold chain compliance and product integrity for customers in the region.
The chilled product will supply Middle East distributor Al Tayeb, a division of Lulu Group, supporting ongoing demand for high-quality New Zealand red meat.
Scott Hurdley, Silver Fern Farms' general manager logistics, says the delivery highlights the company's commitment to finding solutions forf customers during a period of disruption across sea freight routes.
“We have longstanding customer partnerships of over 35 years in the Middle East, and many exporters are currently experiencing difficulty servicing this important region,” he says.
“This shipment demonstrates how Silver Fern Farms continues to innovate and work closely with our supply chain partner Al Tayeb to ensure we continue meet our commitments to this market and protect the integrity of our chilled products.”
The Middle East is a strategic market for Silver Fern Farms, particularly for chilled lamb and beef.
With traditional freight routes constrained, the chartered airfreight solution provided an alternative pathway to maintain continuity of supply and uphold long‑standing relationship with Lulu Group.
The plane arrived in Abu Dhabi on Tuesday, with the product successfully disembarked and distributed by Al Tayeb, and Hurdley says the airfreight was made possible thanks to close coordination right across the supply chain.
“We have done smaller-scale airfreight before however completely filling a plane was unique,” he says.
“As the proposition of our chilled product is about shortening the time between the farm and the end consumer, this shipment required close coordination right from our New Zealand-based planning teams right through to our dedicated Middle East office and Al Tayeb team,” he says.
Silver Fern Farms also worked closely with global logistics partner Hellmann Worldwide Logistics to plan and execute the shipment, ensuring strict temperature control and cold‑chain compliance from departure through to arrival.
Auckland Airport supported the operation by facilitating the airside process.
Hurdley says the success of the shipment underlines New Zealand’s ability to deliver premium food products to international markets, even under challenging conditions.
“Silver Fern Farms is proud to be a partner of one of the leading retailers (LuLu Group) in the Middle East, with a robust network spanning multiple markets and a strong global sourcing ecosystem. This collaboration reflects our shared commitment to delivering world-class quality to our customers while ensuring a resilient and reliable food supply chain,” he says.
“Our customers rely on us to deliver consistently, particularly during periods of uncertainty. This is about protecting trust, maintaining partnerships, and ensuring consumers in the Middle East continue to access high‑quality New Zealand lamb and beef,” he says.
OPINION: A nation that relies as heavily as NZ does on functional global shipping lanes will have to do its bit on the international security front, hence the additional $1.58b in military spend over 4 years that Dame Lynda Topp thought should have been spent on sheet music.
Applications for Silver Fern Farms Co-operative's next board-appointed farmer director are open.
Silver Fern Farms has tackled the ongoing war-induced shipping challenges to mideast markets by airlifting 90 tonnes of chilled New Zealand lamb and beef to the United Arab Emirates.
The situation in the Middle East has been a major influence on markets over recent months and the market for key farm inputs continues to move at pace, with pricing and availability shifting quickly across several key products, according to a major stockfood seller.
There's optimism emerging among farmers on the Chatham Islands after years of an irregular and poor shipping service.
Despite near universal optimism in the rural sector, a panel of New Zealand’s leading food and agri minds caution that the sector must be intentional about its future path.
The panel say this is needed if the sector is to successfully
navigate the social, economic, environmental and technological forces impacting its operating environment.
Their views form part of the latest version of Rabobank’s annual white paper ‘Succession 2050 – gearing up for New Zealand’s food and agri future’.
The white paper focuses on the topic of succession at an industry level.
In addition to Rabobank’s own insights, the paper brings together a selection of 14 leading New Zealand and international food and agri experts – including trade negotiators, economists, systems analysts, scientists and technologists along with sectoral experts in sustainability, the future of fibre and Māori enterprise – to share their perspectives on what the New Zealand food and agri sector could look like in 2050 and what needs to change to achieve that vision.
Launching the new paper at the Primary Industries New Zealand Summit in Auckland today, Rabobank New Zealand CEO Todd Charteris said the experts who contributed to the white paper had identified plenty of reasons for New Zealand to be confident about its food and agri future.
“To name just a few, we’re a major food producer in a food-hungry world that’s on track to need 56% more food by 2050,” he said.
“Our food and fibre exports are also growing strongly and are forecast to hit $64.3 billion for the year to June 2026, while our government has signalled its plans to help double overall New Zealand exports by 2034.”
While there were many reasons for optimism, Charteris said, the expert contributors had also noted a host of changes taking place across the global food and agri operating environment that would need to be navigated for the industry to achieve ongoing success in the decades ahead.
“A number of key changes shaping the future of the sector came through in the perspectives of the expert contributors,” he said.
“There are the well-canvased issues of increasing global food insecurity, the challenging trade environment driven by geopolitical tensions, and the need to produce food within planetary limits."
“However, the experts also raised emerging trends, including what we’ve called ‘Identity eating’ – which is the growing way of signalling who you are as a person through what you eat – and is leading to higher demand for ethical and health-conscious foods.
“Another key trend identified out to 2050 was ‘Exponential everything’, which covers the transformation of the sector through science and technology.”
Rather than let these changes wash over it like a tsunami, Mr Charteris said, the broadly held view among the expert contributors was that New Zealand’s agriculture sector would need to lean in and proactively shape the changes occurring around it.
“We heard this message in many different ways; whether it was influencing global trade policy, embracing technology, capitalising on sustainability, training up for the future, defending our advantage in dairy or kiwifruit, growing Māori enterprise or more deliberately utilising all the wealth in our big blue backyard,” he said.
Charteris said the white paper contributors had identified 23 changes they would like to see in New Zealand between now and 2050 that will help set up the sector for success.
“Essentially, they boil down into five buckets with four to five ‘work ons’ in each bucket,” he said.
“At the centre, we need a change model that starts from the customer perspective and works outward from that, feeding into more purposeful decisions about land use and production systems.
“Then once we are clear on what customers are asking for and where we want to play, we need to stack talent and technology.
“Between these items we have the elements of a 2050 growth engine.”
What’s exciting, Charteris said, is that New Zealand has the geography, the capacity, the ideas, and the time, to make something outstanding of its future.
“My wish is that our experts’ thinking will inspire others to join me in pushing for a more deliberative strategic future for New Zealand,” he said.
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