My backpacker jobs during my Working Holiday Visa in New Zealand

Kiwifruit repacking

Not to be confused with kiwifruit packing, kiwifruit repacking is much more chill. This job involves emptying a box of packed kiwifruits into a new box, one by one, and sorting them.

Pros

Since packhouses don’t need as many staff for repacking, the atmosphere is much more familiar. Plus, here you’re allowed to have headphones which meant I spent my days listening to podcasts and music. And that’s pretty cool.

Another perk of the job is that, for once, I was fast. Very fast, in fact. I was almost able to fill a pallet of kiwi boxes a day. Each pallet contains 160 boxes of kiwifruits and each box weighs about 5kg. So I was packing about 800 kg of kiwifruit per day, or 100 kg per hour one kiwifruit at a time. If you do the math, I would have manually packed 24 tons of kiwifruit.

This was the job where I earned the most because we were paid by the number of boxes. Moreover, it was during the second containment. So I was able to put a lot of money aside.

Cons
You will learn about different types of molds and if you are sensitive to odors, this is not ideal.

Bottom line: tested, approved.