When the Rockit Global coolstore at Irongate, Hastings opened earlier this year, it did so a month ahead of schedule. For a premium apple brand whose entire business model depends on supplying fruit to markets around the world across a full twelve months, the timing was everything.
The harvest waits for no one, and having a purpose-built facility ready and commissioned before the first bins arrived wasn’t just a construction milestone. It was the difference between a season that worked and one that didn’t.
“Being operational for the harvest was the key,” says Richard Kinnear, Britkin’s managing director. “We got there a month early, which meant everyone was happy.”
Everyone in this case includes GEK Property, the Auckland-based property investor who owns the Irongate site, and Rockit Global, the premium apple company whose entire global supply model depends on fruit being stored in precisely controlled conditions for up to twelve months of the year. Getting it wrong isn’t an inconvenience. It’s millions of dollars of fruit at risk.
That Britkin delivers projects like this reliably, and repeatedly, for some of New Zealand’s most exacting primary sector operators, is no accident. It’s the product of more than forty years of accumulated knowledge, operational experience and deep regional relationships.
The roots of it all
The Britkin story begins with Gordon Kinnear, who in the early 1980s pioneered the development of coolstore and controlled-environment facilities in Hawke’s Bay at a time when the technology was largely untested in New Zealand.
Gordon went on to partner in the purchase of the Whakatu freezer storage facilities following the closure of the meat works, and continued developing coolstore capacity across the region throughout his career.
He was, by all accounts, a lateral thinker who questioned conventional approaches and never accepted the first answer as the best one. That instinct passed to his children, Barbara Brittin and Richard Kinnear, who between them have built Britkin into one of the region’s most experienced commercial and industrial construction businesses.
Gordon passed away in 2016, but his influence is present in every project Britkin takes on. The questions they ask before design begins, the scrutiny applied to technical specifications, the refusal to cut corners on the details that matter long after handover. It all traces back to how Gordon approached a problem.
Not just a big fridge
The Rockit Global project at Irongate is a good illustration of what Britkin does that others don’t. The 9,000sqm coolstore has capacity for 42,000 bins of apples, close to 19 million kilograms of fruit. But the technical requirements go well beyond scale.
Rockit Global’s supply model means the company needs to deliver fruit to markets around the world across a full twelve-month period, rather than the three to five month window typical of most New Zealand apple exporters. That requires 50% of the coolstore to be Controlled Atmosphere (CA) storage, a significantly higher proportion than a standard facility.
CA storage is a precise science. The space is sealed and pressurised, nitrogen is introduced, and oxygen levels are reduced to between one and two percent.
The apples are, as Richard puts it, essentially put into a coma. The ageing process slows dramatically, preserving the fruit in a condition close to harvest-fresh for months longer than refrigerated atmosphere storage alone would allow.
“Different apples need different treatment,” Richard explains. “They need to be handled almost variety by variety in the way they’re cooled and stored. It’s not just a big fridge that you put the apples in and good luck.”
Britkin’s ability to deliver on these specifications comes from a long track record of building coolstores specifically for the apple industry, working with technical suppliers and building institutional knowledge about refrigeration, airflow and fruit handling that simply can’t be replicated quickly.
A track record built project by project
The Rockit coolstore sits on the same Irongate site as the Sunfruit coolstore, completed by Britkin in March 2023. Richard played a role in bringing the two projects together, identifying the potential for a second development on the site and introducing GEK Property to Rockit Global when the opportunity arose.
It speaks to something important about how Britkin operates. They’re not a company that builds to a brief and moves on. They bring commercial thinking to every project, which is partly what keeps clients like GEK and Bostock New Zealand returning for project after project.
Bostock is perhaps the clearest example of a long-term construction partnership. Britkin has delivered a chicken processing facility at Bridge Pa, an organic chicken factory on Kirkwood Road, office extensions, and a 160-bed RSE worker accommodation facility at Irongate for the free-range poultry business. The relationship has extended across a decade and multiple facility types.
Further afield, Britkin completed CA storage work for Pozzebon in Stanthorpe, Queensland, demonstrating that the expertise built in Hawke’s Bay translates across the Tasman.
Many coolstores and packhouses in the Omahu Industrial area have been built by Britkin including 9020sqm of coolstores in Henderson Road and Mr Apple coolstore on the corner of Hill Road.
They’ve also completed a purpose-built nutrition facility for ruminant nutrition specialist Ruminate in Awatoto, Napier, a combined manufacturing, office and showroom development for Twin City Aluminium in Hastings, and a modern head office and workshop for Isaacs Electrical and Plumbing on Karamu Road.
The team behind the delivery
Britkin’s consistent delivery across such a range of project types comes down to something straightforward: the relationships they’ve built with designers, structural engineers, geotech specialists, surveyors and trade contractors over decades of working together.
“Having a consistent and reliable team of subcontractors who move from project to project, with each individual trade taking responsibility for their timeframe within the critical pathway,” is how Richard describes it. It means Britkin goes into every project knowing the capability behind them.
For clients building facilities where millions of dollars of perishable product depends on a building performing exactly as it was designed to, that kind of certainty is worth a great deal.
