Home > Updates > Client Story | Cape Produce New Zealand
Growth in family farming isn’t just measured in hectares or tonnes. It’s measured in resilience, relationships, and the ability to adapt in a constantly changing global market. Few people understand that better than Andrew Douglas. He took the family business, Cape Produce, and transformed it from a modest family orchard to one of New Zealand’s leading boutique fruit exporters – all while building a network of local family farms that now sell their produce through it too.
At the centre of that growth story has been a partnership built on trust, communication, and shared values. We recently sat down with Andrew to hear how it all came together.
Andrew never planned a career in fruit. If anything, he planned his way out of it. “Around the dinner table growing up, farming was hard going,” he says. “My parents worked incredibly hard on the apple farm, but the business model was brutal. You’d spend money on the next crop before you even knew what you’d been paid for the last one.”
Determined to forge a different path, Andrew studied economics and international trade at the University of Canterbury, then spent five years playing professional cricket. But when a back injury brought him home to New Zealand, fruit found him again.
“One day I was digging holes on the orchard with a spade, because my old man thought it would fix my back.” he laughs. “I remember seeing a fruit exporter pull up and thinking, ‘that looks a bit easier.’”
It wasn’t really about easier work. It was about a different part of the industry – the trade and logistics side, where his economics background actually fit. That moment led to a role with a major Australian and New Zealand produce company, where he spent nearly a decade developing global export expertise across apples, avocados, cherries, and other produce categories.
Eventually he brought that expertise back to the family orchard, building an export operation around it. What began as handling his own fruit and helping a few neighbouring growers soon grew into something far larger. “We thought we’d help a few friends out while shifting some of our own produce,” he says. “Fast forward six years, and we’re now the largest persimmon exporter in the country.”
Today, Cape Produce spans orchards, export logistics, packaging and branded produce, supplying domestic and international markets while maintaining a strong focus on family-owned growers.
Where many corporate exporters chase scale, Cape Produce has deliberately stayed focused on relationships, agility, and grower-first thinking. It runs multiple orchards, packs its own fruit under family brands, and employs a mix of permanent and seasonal staff year-round.
“We’ve built a circular business where everything supports each other,” Andrew says. “I can be doing accounting one minute and driving tractors the next – and honestly, I like that balance.”
Much of the company’s success comes down to how it handles data and logistics across the supply chain. “Data is king in our industry,” he says. “There are thousands of data points, temperature, timing, freight, packaging, market conditions – and our job is to hold the fruit’s hand from the orchard right through to the consumer.”
That mix of discipline and agility has let Cape Produce keep creating value for growers, even when conditions turned against them.
“COVID was scary for everyone,” Andrew recalls. “Freight rates went up about 130%, but our grower returns actually increased because we adapted quickly and repositioned our products around health and wellness messaging.”
It’s a telling result. The brutal grower economics that once drove Andrew away from the family business became the very thing it now exists to fix – for his own fruit, and for the local growers who export through Cape Produce.
As Cape Produce grew, so too did its complexity. Managing orchard cycles, export seasons, and accounting periods simultaneously created significant challenges.
That’s where Nexia Hawke’s Bay became a genuine strategic partner. “One of the biggest things for us is confidence,” Andrew says. “This industry carries huge financial risk, and a lot of capital comes straight out of my own bank account.”
Working closely with Ben Gilmour and the Nexia Hawke’s Bay team, Cape Produce built integrated reporting that connected its export software, sales data, and accounting into one clear financial picture. “We’ve got accounting years, crop years, and export years all overlapping,” Andrew says. “Nexia Hawke’s Bay helped integrate all of that so we could actually understand our profitability properly.”
The relationship runs deeper than traditional accounting advice. “You can become quite insular running orchards and a business like this,” he says. “Having someone outside the business who understands the industry and the numbers gives you perspective and confidence.”
That perspective has helped Cape Produce stay clear-eyed about what success actually means. “We’ve had opportunities to get much bigger, but growth for growth’s sake isn’t our passion,” Andrew says. “We want to stay true to the family values that got us here.”
For Cape Produce, the Nexia relationship reflects the same principles behind its own success: communication, trust, and partnerships that last. “In this game, everything comes back to relationships,” Andrew says. “That’s how we’ve built our business, and it’s why the partnership with Nexia works so well.”
He’s also quick to share the credit. “We’re happy to put our hand up and say we’ve done well,” he says. “But that’s because we’ve had the right people around us. And Nexia has absolutely been part of that foundation.”
Like Cape Produce, many successful businesses are built on strong relationships and informed decisions – Nexia New Zealand partners with business owners to provide the financial insight and strategic advice needed to support sustainable growth. Contact our team of expert advisers today to discuss how we can help your business move forward.
Nexia New Zealand is a leading full-service chartered accounting and business advisory consultancy firm, offering the full range of chartered accountancy, business advisory, corporate advisory, tax compliance and tax advice, and audit services.
Nexia New Zealand has four offices throughout New Zealand: Victoria Street in Christchurch, Albany on Auckland’s North Shore, Newmarket in the Auckland CBD and Hastings in Hawke’s Bay.
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