In the midst of an orchard disease crisis, kiwifruit pioneer Russel Lowe came to the rescue with a brand-new gold variety.
The kiwifruit breeder created the first commercial gold fruit in the country, using trial and error to perfect the juicy, sweet taste Kiwis could still find on their shelves today.
Lowe believed there was room in the industry for more than just green kiwifruit varieties and was inspired to set himself apart from other growers.
"We could see the potential there to have something different in the market. Perhaps sweeter tasting than the green and other characters that might appeal to people," he explained.
"Over the years crosses were made and parents selected. From that population my colleague and I selected the gold kiwi fruit that has become Hort 16A."
The gold breed got its name from the plot of the orchard it was originally grown in, down to the exact position in the row amongst other fruit.
However, it wasn't an overnight success for the grower, who still had work to do to achieve the perfect fruit.
"We started looking at some of our other genetic material that we had that were larger-fruited and had much better storage life, but the taste wasn't satisfactory, very sour tasting. So the thought was to try and incorporate some of the characters from the original Hort 16A into this new material," Lowe said.
It wasn't until 2006 that the team struck gold, finally finding the kiwifruit that Lowe believed was "going somewhere".
"There was just four fruit on this plant, and a colleague in the operations team, Kirsten, brought this fruit into us and said, Wow, what do you think of this?
"We were just over the moon with the taste and the size," he said.
The taste wasn't the only wow-factor of the Gold 3 fruit, as it proved to be resistant to the PSA bacterial disease that destroyed orchards across the country.
While many growers lost their gold kiwifruit productions, Lowe's Gold 3 persevered, eventually being used to rescue struggling farms.
Lowe believed the distribution of the variety saved not only the fruit trees, but people's livelihoods.
"They could just chop the grass off and re-graph with G3 onto the existing mature root stocks. So that meant within a couple of years they had some production coming back.
"If they'd had to rip everything out and replant, it would have been five years and very significant time without any income, whatever," he explained.
The real shock, however, is that the industry-saving gold variety isn't even Lowe's favourite.
"My favourite's the red.
"[They're] as sweet as the gold and probably twice as much vitamin c as the green kiwifruit. More than the gold. It's healthier, good benefits."
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