LOS ANGELES, CA - T&G Global is ambitiously bolstering its workforce, as the purveyor has recently announced it is recruiting 150 permanent positions across its apple operations. This move comes as the supplier sets out to expand its apple business to meet global demand and provide career opportunities to existing talent within the industry.

“Our apples business has an ambitious growth strategy in place to grow our premium Envy™ and JAZZ™ apple brands to meet worldwide demand. To achieve this vision, it’s critical we have a talented, passionate, and supported team who are empowered to be their best,” said Director of Operations, Craig Betty.

The 150 new permanent roles are being advertised internally amongst T&G’s casual and contracted seasonal workforce, as well as externally in the local community, according to a company release. Those employed will move through T&G’s harvest and post-harvest roles, developing a thorough understanding of operational and growing processes, including spending time developing the supplier’s 2D orchards as it continues its path to automation.

“Across our growing operations, we’re re-developing our orchards to 2D planting structures to support the efficient use of automation and robotics in the future,” Betty explained. “We’re committed to our roadmap to automation and continually optimising our supply chain to increase productivity. By ensuring we have skilled team members in our operations, we’ll be able to help fast-track this process.”

In addition to finding support at the peak of the apple season, T&G will also need to recruit thousands of people nationwide for the upcoming season.

“Recruitment remains a critical focus for the upcoming 2021/22 season,” Betty continued. “This season, our team did an incredible job hiring more than 950 New Zealanders to work alongside a reduced number of RSE team members. However, at the peak of the season we were still short around 300 people per day, which meant we left a significant amount of fruit on trees. With these new positions, we expect our productivity to increase as we build our team’s skills and capabilities, however we’ll still require additional seasonal team members to join us throughout the harvest.”

T&G is currently offering its existing seasonal team members the opportunity to apply, while also looking externally to fill the 150 positions.

“Despite our very best efforts to recruit locally last year, the 2020/21 season was extremely challenging, with limited availability of skilled people ready to work in the regions, combined with a reduced number of Recognised Seasonal Employer (RSE) team members,” explained Betty. “The new roles we’re creating have been developed to help us deliver on our future growth objectives, whilst also helping retain our existing talent and provide people with an opportunity to further build their skills and capabilities within our operations.”

Keep reading ANUK as we continue to report on the latest labor strategies in the fresh produce industry.

T&G Global