Hectre wins two prestigious New Zealand technology awards

Hectre, the global fruit quality intelligence company, won two awards at New Zealand's most high-profile celebration of innovation, the NZ Hi-Tech Awards.

The company won Most Innovative Hi-Tech Agritech Solution and Hi-Tech Kamupene Māori o te Tau (Māori Company of the Year) for its cutting-edge fruit quality technology, used by packhouses in 22 countries around the world.

CEO and co-founder Matty Blomfield, who accepted the awards in Auckland / Tāmaki Makaurau just days after returning from hosting a global customer tour in Chile, said the wins reflected both the scale of the problem Hectre had set out to solve and the values underpinning the company.

The fresh produce supply chain loses an estimated $80b a year to inefficiency, much of it preventable with better information at the right time.

"Nature gives us everything for free. But about a third of the world's fresh produce never reaches you. It rots, gets repacked, gets dumped. And the growers who did the work see the least of the return. The system is broken. Hectre exists to help solve it," he said. "Our technology rebalances the food supply chain and shifts value back to the people closest to the land.”

Hectre celebrates its Māori heritage

Blomfield, who has whakapapa to Ngāti Kahungunu and Ngāti Hine, said the Māori Company of the Year recognition carried particular weight for him personally. The award recognizes the values that guide the team, including whanaungatanga (teamwork), rangatiratanga (excellence), kōkiri (action), and manaaki (care). All are anchored by pono, or integrity.

The awards were presented at a gala dinner at Spark Arena in Auckland last week, attended by more than 1,200 guests from across New Zealand's technology sector.

In his acceptance speech, Blomfield drew on New Zealand's agricultural identity: "We're a nation with Ag in our DNA. So as a nation we have earned the right to compete here on a global stage."

Hectre's platform uses machine learning and computer vision to deliver real-time fruit sizing and color grading for packhouses and growers.

Its proprietary Arc camera scans thousands of pieces of fruit at intake, replacing manual sampling with near-99 percent accuracy from sample sizes 200 times larger than traditional methods.

Customers running some of the largest packhouses in the world—from South America and the US to Europe—describe Hectre as the industry’s leading innovator, with the technology delivering double-digit increases in output and significantly less food waste.

"These awards belong to our entire Hectre team," Blomfield said. "We wouldn't be here without 10 years of hard mahi, to our early customers, my whānau, and to the entire Hectre team, kia ora. We don't say it every day, but we are a Māori-led company, and I am damn proud.”

Hectre recently closed a $12m Series A round, oversubscribed from a $10m target. The capital is being deployed into hyperspectral imaging technology to identify fruit defects and assess maturity at packhouse scale.

*All images courtesy of Hectre. 

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