What is the New Zealand Agritech Story?

The New Zealand Agritech Story is a suite of key messages and marketing material designed to form a compelling, consistent and coherent way of promoting New Zealand’s agritech capabilities internationally. It’s designed to grow awareness and preference for New Zealand agritech solutions and promote New Zealand as a source of world-class agri-innovation.

The key audience for the Agritech Story – the people it’s designed to speak to – are international buyers, investors, industry media and influencers in the agritech sector, especially in the United States, United Kingdom and Ireland which are priority markets for New Zealand agritech exports.

Why do we need an Agritech Story?

While New Zealand has a strong reputation globally for farming expertise and world-class food production systems, we aren’t widely recognised for our agritech capabilities or the value our technology can deliver for food producers around the world.

A compelling and consistent story about New Zealand agritech will build our reputation in this area and help more of our agritech businesses to succeed on the world stage.

Agricultural technology is vital to the primary industries that underpin our economy, and has an ongoing role to play in transforming these industries towards higher productivity and better environmental outcomes.

Agritech also has significant value for New Zealand’s export economy. It currently contributes approximately $1.5 billion to our export receipts, and has significant potential for growth as overseas producers look to technology to help meet the food demands of a growing global population

How was the story developed?

The development of the New Zealand Agritech Story was led by a project team including representatives from across the Agritech ecosystem and government.
While the knowledge and expertise of this project group helped guide the Story development, the overall narrative and messages were informed by a series of industry engagement workshops, and by in-market insights gathered by consulting firm Deloitte.

Industry workshops were held in Hamilton, Palmerston North and Lincoln, and involved around 80 representatives from across the agritech sector. These were designed to gather industry insights about New Zealand agritech’s key areas of strength or competitive advantage overseas.

Deloitte conducted offshore market insights research on current perceptions of New Zealand agritech by key industry stakeholders in priority markets – the United States, United Kingdom and Ireland. This included 30 email surveys, followed by 17 in-depth one-on-one interviews to discuss perceived strengths and weaknesses of New Zealand agritech in the interviewee’s market. These market insights were supplemented by information previously commissioned or shared by individual businesses.

The gathered insights were grouped into main themes and used to develop a series of key messages which reinforce perceived areas of strength and respond to perceived weaknesses or misconceptions about New Zealand agritech. These messages were then developed into a narrative to form the New Zealand Agritech Story.

For more detail on the Story development, themes and verbatim comments from interviewees please refer to our detailed Market Insights report, available as part of the wider suite of Story assets.