Staff at the New World supermarket in Whitianga are back on the water as they deliver food to the Coromandel peninsula by boat.
New World has operated its Waka Kai service each holiday season since 2019, running groceries by sea to avoid the summer traffic.
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Last year it upgraded to a larger vessel to keep up with demand.
“The old saying ‘we’re going to need a bigger boat’ has come true for New World Whitianga’s Waka Kai for sure,” Kerry Stanley, who runs the service, said.
“It’s 11.2 metres long so we can get up to 850 kilos of groceries at a time. We’ve been putting that to the test already with over four tonnes of groceries delivered in the first week.”
With hundreds of thousands of visitors to the Coromandel Peninsula during the summer period, Stanley said New World had done the math and discovered boat deliveries were significantly faster than travelling by road.
“We realised that, as people who know the Coromandel well know, it’s one of the most beautiful places in New Zealand but the roads are challenging over summer because a lot of people want to come and enjoy that lovely holiday experience so it made it pretty difficult for our vans to deliver in a timely manner,” he said.
He said Waka Kai went as far as Pauanui, which is 60 kilometres away by road.
“It’s about an hour and a half on the road, but it’s only about 45 minutes on Waka Kai,” Stanley said.
He said the goal of the service was to let people relax, instead of sitting in traffic on their way to the supermarket.
“I was out on Waka Kai [on Sunday], we met some lovely people, big orders as they’re all expecting family and friends at this time of year, but they were just so relaxed and enjoying the service.”
