We all have our favourite apples. Often it’s more than one variety depending on the time of year. From fresh juicy Braeburns in high summer, to rich rewarding Granny Smith apple pies in the colder months, there’s an apple for all seasons.

That said, tastes change - we’re all interested in discovering new things and getting excited about fresh flavours.

That’s why Luv’ya is always on the hunt for the very latest apple.

Our very own eve® apples were discovered as a standout red apple in one of our orchards in Nelson way back in 1992. eve® is now one of our fastest sellers, offering superior colour, crunch, and an impossibly crisp tangy flavour.

To increase our breadth of new apple opportunities, the Luv’ya team travels the world looking for new apples. We’re part of the IPA (International Pomme Fruit Alliance), an exclusive global collective based in every corner of the globe, who share a common goal - to discover something new and exciting.

Although apples grow on trees, growing the right apple in the right place can take decades. It can take over 10 years to bring a new apple to market. Five years to bring the wood through quarantine into New Zealand, five years to grow enough wood to propagate a new variety, and 2-3 years until each tree can yield delicious and sustainable fruit. That’s the kind of commitment you need to make truly great fruit.

Nothing tastes better than an apple plucked straight from the tree. But to get you apples all year round we put our summer surplus to sleep in oxygen-free storage rooms. This radically reduces the rate at which apples ‘breathe’ - basically put them to sleep. All the goodness, the flavour and the taste is locked in ready for you to enjoy when the time is right for you.

Apples love sun - the more sun the better. In the old days we used to pick leaves off the trees to let the sun shine in. Now, when labour is short, we’ve automated that process. Our new defoliators blow low pressure, calibrated blasts of air that shatter leafs, while leaving apples untouched. Light then streams in, giving our apples superior colour and aiding the flavour maturation process. Brilliant thinking.

Ladders - every orchard has them. But standing on a ladder, while traditional, doesn’t give our staff the safety and security we need to pick apples fast.

Picking apples fast means they’re off our trees, chilled and in your hands in better condition.

So we invested in outstanding Italian-made picking platforms. These are slow moving vehicles with multi-level platforms that tether our pickers to a central safety pole. With that mobility and safety, we can harvest a tree at all three levels - low, middle and high, at a pace that’s sustainable and efficient.

You can’t stop the weather. While we don’t get hail often, when we do we need to be prepared.

It’s important for us to continue to invest in hail netting to make sure we can harvest large quantities of high quality fruit, season after season.

Flat top net covering hectares of apple trees are the easy answer. More interesting are our V-tech apple tree supports - metal beams shaped like a V topped with protective vaults of hardy material. Hail hits the tunnel cover, bouncing off harmlessly into the middle of our tree rows. Simple, and very effective.