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The award-winning Emseni Farming in rural Kranskop, KwaZulu-Natal, recently opened its new world-class packhouse, promising greater success, increased productivity, and abundant avocado harvests. The new packhouse is an impressive 15 000m2 facility with strong natural insulation, ensuring energy-efficient operations while maintaining cool internal temperatures.
The 7 000m2 cool room can accommodate different temperature regimes, allowing for sensitive step-down cooling and effective pre-cooling. The temperature-controlled packing area maintains an uninterrupted cold chain. The Masgcor Tomra packing line uses world-class sorting technology. Featuring dedicated capsicum (sweet peppers) and avocado infeed and packing designs, the eight-lane machine can achieve up to 12 cups per second and up to 36 tonnes of avocados per hour. Its advanced camera technology combines nine colour and infrared cameras per lane, capturing up to 300 images of every fruit.
This enables Emseni to supply each customer with the exact quality and quantity of fruit they require, while maximising both orchard yield and grower income. Emseni is not only a leading avocado producer, but it also produces sweet peppers and a variety of other produce.
From humble roots to agricultural legacy
What began in 1969 as vegetable gardens to meet the community’s physical needs has grown into one of South Africa’s most successful, diversified agricultural legacy projects. Before Emseni’s establishment, the farmland comprised many hectares of wattle plantation. Reverend Erlo Stegen, founder of the KwaSizabantu Mission, worked with a handful of dedicated co-workers to clear the land and plant staple vegetables. Two years later, they had enough cabbage, spinach and amadumbe (a starchy root vegetable) to feed themselves and sell the excess in neighbouring rural areas.
Emseni has grown over the years into a successful, diversified agricultural business that includes export-quality avocados. A specialised packhouse serves as a critical link between the orchard and the market. It is essential in avocado farming because it preserves fruit quality, reduces losses, and ensures that the fruit meets market requirements. Emseni’s packhouses began humbly and have expanded steadily alongside the enterprise.
In 1983, the company planted its first sweet peppers in 3 000m2 glass greenhouses and conducted various crop experiments. That same year, they also planted their first 300 avocado trees in fertile soil. The first avocado harvesting and packing began in 1986. Emseni didn’t yet have a dedicated packing facility, so it packed avocados under the trees for the South African market. In 1995, they established a basic warehouse for their first avocado export to Great Britain. Emseni then built a food-safe, accredited pepper packhouse in 2003.
This milestone enabled them to retail peppers directly and independently. A few years later, in 2007, they renovated and expanded the packhouse. This upgrade allowed the farm to pack all produce under one roof, adding a fully automated grading line that sorts fruit by colour, weight, and size.
New packhouse to support growth
The upgrade to the current packhouse began in 2025, along with the first construction work on a new packhouse. Dietmar Joosten, farm manager at Emseni, emphasised the importance of the expansion: “It was crucial that the new packhouse not only provide the much-needed space but also enable machinery upgrades, improve efficiency, and support future growth. We trust that God will let Emseni Farming continue to grow with grace and that many lives will be touched through this work.”
Emseni now has approximately 200ha of avocado trees, of which 150 ha are in full production, predominantly the Hass cultivar. The new packhouse opened recently, in 2026. What began with just six dedicated co-workers has grown into a major agricultural enterprise with over 600 employees and plans for future expansion. Read more about Emseni Farming’s journey by following the link:
https://www.emseni.co.za/our-journey/ – Gerda Potgieter, Devoted Magazine
Emseni Farming’s new packhouse.
