From ‘lemons’ to ‘absolute winners’: How three generations built a Christchurch apple empire

Saturday, 27 June 2026

Canterbury is one of New Zealand’s food baskets, with its crops filling larders across Aotearoa and beyond. The Press’ HOMEGROWN series champions local growers, chronicling their triumphs and the shifting challenges they face. Read more Homegrown stories here.

Tucked away amid a seemingly ever-increasing number of homes and motorway connections in northern Christchurch, three generations of one local family tend to an apple empire.

Adrienne Malcolm, 80, has largely been running the show since the Malcolm family first bought an 8 hectare block on Belfast’s Crawford Rd in 1980.

She and dentist husband Peter undertook the painstaking process of converting it from a dairy farm into an orchard, planting out their fields with Braeburns and Red Deliciouses.

Son Andrew Malcolm, 55, was only about 11 at the time. But right from the start, he was mucking in. His own son Tom, 26, can be found on any given day overseeing the packhouse.

Andrew said the Red Delicious apples they planted turned out to be “lemons”.

“But we did back an absolute winner,” Andrew said. Braeburns, a New Zealand variety, “took the world by storm” during the 80s and 90s.

“The UK, USA, couldn’t get enough [of them]. So although we were pulling out half the orchard, the 30% or so that we put into Braeburns just did spectacularly well.”

The world of apples had changed a lot since then, he said, and many family orchards like theirs had disappeared.

“There are still some very successful family groups. But it is challenging, you do need scale to survive,” he said.

“So we’ve had to get a lot bigger, and spend a lot on infrastructure too.”

Now they grow 10 commercial apple varieties on about 100,000 trees, spread between their expanded Belfast family farm, and a newer acquisition in Waipara. So far this year, they had sent out about 4400 bins of apples – each weighing nearly half a tonne.

Where once they exported much of their crop, the Malcolms had shifted to the domestic market, and these apples are sold at Woolworths supermarkets across the country.

How they operated had changed in other ways too. It was now a high-tech business.

An optical grading machine housed in a big blue box takes 40 images of each of the hundreds of apples passing through each minute, checking for splits and even hidden bruising.

They’re sorted based on the defects it finds. Some are tagged as premium fruit, while those with small physical imperfections go into ‘Odd Bunch’ bags. More damaged apples are set aside to be used for juice, or even stock feed.

“But quality is grown in the orchard,” Malcolm said. “Our apples are grown in real soil, they’re exposed to real weather… Each of these apples tells a story.

“It’s not about growing a huge crop of tasteless fruit, it’s about growing a crop of apples we love to eat.”

Like many of Canterbury’s growers large and small, the Malcolms anticipated a challenging future. He suspected climate change would be behind some of the biggest challenges the family would face.

“With Canterbury, one to two degrees warming is probably mainly a plus side… If we're two degrees warmer in summer, it suddenly makes us a much better growing region.”

The downside came in the form of more volatile weather.

“Even last summer, the number of thunderstorms and hail events for Canterbury was mind-blowing,” he said.

“We get one crop of apples a year, and if you get five minutes of heavy hail, we’re toast.”

The family was hard at work future-proofing their operation. They were about to build their first permanent, fixed-roof structure over part of the orchard, which would protect trees with 30,000 square-metres of netting.

But the Malcolms were also seeing Belfast change around them.

“Now we’ve suddenly got subdivisions 200m away.”

Having close urban neighbours had sometimes caused conflict with working farms in the area, especially around things like manure usage, or using wind machines to protect crops from frost.

Rates had crept up considerably too. The rates they paid per hectare on their new property in the Hurunui district were less than a quarter of what they paid in Christchurch, “which is why we’re putting a toe in the door elsewhere”.

“In 20 years’ time, most of our production could be on the other side of the Waimak. But we hope it’s not.”