The company’s financials highlight the significant pressure facing the New Zealand arm of the business.
Under McCain Food New Zealand’s parent company, Weyville Holdings, McCain’s New Zealand operation reported a $16.9 million loss in the year to June 30, 2025.
The financial result shows the company’s revenue fell from $325.7m in 2024 to $306.7m in 2025, a drop of $19.9m year-on-year.
Peter Raikes from Raikes Family Holdings has been growing crops in Hastings for McCains for more than 20 years and said the news was a “bombshell”.
“We had no idea. I knew they were struggling in terms of sales, but I never thought they would pull the pin.”
He said McCains had been a good company to deal with and that he would look at his options to try to retain staff.
“We are not going to despair, we will just press on.”
Hugh Ritchie’s family farm in Ōtāne has been growing process crops since the 1960s and for McCain since 1996.
He found out about the plant closure on Tuesday when a friend called him after seeing the story in the media.
Ritchie said the farm was McCain’s only carrot supplier, and its equipment to pre-process the carrots would become redundant.
He had contacted staff to reassure them that work would carry on.
Ritchie said the closure would affect half the farm’s cropping area and “about a quarter” of the farm’s income.
He said McCain had reduced the current season’s total volume of peas by “about 20%” and sweetcorn and beans by 50% because of frozen stock the company couldn’t move.
But Ritchie said indications from McCain “envisaged getting back to normal production levels this coming season”.
Ritchie said he suspected Heinz Wattie announcing it would cut jobs around the country, including in Hastings, had emboldened food processors like McCain to follow suit.
He said the job losses and closures were not companies “doing growers dirty” but making a “valid commercial decision to stay in business or not”.
“The question we have to ask is, why can’t they make money?” Ritchie said.
“I believe that there’s an undue balance in power in who owns or who claims the value creation from the products.
“We need to be able to assure ourselves that there is actually a viable food-growing option in this country, and if it’s not, why not? Because it should be.”
Supermarkets have been in the spotlight following Wattie’s job cuts, with Newsroom reporting Foodstuffs had appeared to prioritise its own branded product over Wattie’s since a 2021 frozen goods review.
A Foodstuffs spokesperson said margins varied, but as a general guide, the breakdown for every dollar spent in its stores was:
– 68c goes to suppliers
– 15c covers the cost of doing business
– 13c covers GST
– About 4c is post-tax profit retained by local stores in the co-operatives.
“There are many steps between the farmgate price and the shelf,” the spokesperson said.
“That’s why comparing a raw commodity price directly to a retail price doesn’t reflect the full picture.”
A Woolworths spokesperson said its margins and pricing strategies were “commercially sensitive”, but said it was a low-margin, high-volume business.
“Of every dollar spent in our stores, around 62c goes to our suppliers. We keep about 2.3c, and the remainder goes to paying wages and other operational costs, and investing in our store network,” the spokesperson said.
Ritchie said he was an efficient operator, and the farm didn’t have a large labour component.
“If that’s the case, why can’t the companies make money out of it?
“And if we aren’t efficient, well, we probably need to find out and then go and do something else,” he said.
He said people across the agricultural sector were asking where the profit margins were and who profited from the margins.
Ritchie said “we might have to effect some change” if there is a problem.
“The information I’m getting is that there is a problem somewhere within, from once it leaves the farm to when … the consumer actually is getting it.
“I think there’s an imbalance in who shares the value.”
Ritchie said if there was a bright side to the situation, it was people “sitting up and saying ‘what the hell is going on?’”
He said once that’s answered, you get people to “pick the pieces up and start again” in a profitable environment that justifies the investment, or pivot to something else.
“It should be seen as a much bigger issue than just the process veges.
“It’s something that needs to be addressed because just about every industry you talk about actually says that they just don’t feel like the system is working well.
“Don’t waste a good crisis … we need to take this monumental problem and then maybe try and get some good out of it to make sure, going forward, that we have a more sustainable foothold business-wise.”
Jack Riddell is a multimedia journalist with Hawke’s Bay Today and has worked in radio and media in Britain, Germany, and New Zealand.