26 May 2022

The story behind the Mainfreight Apples

Well the story goes; Bruce Plested, Chairman and founder of Mainfreight, had a family friend who had a very  large family. This friend was relatively poor and the local doctor saw his family free of charge. Bruce’s friend would, from time to time, give the doctor a gift of freshly caught fish (a valuable gift in Maori culture) in thanks for providing his services for free. This gesture of thanks and generosity of both men stayed with Bruce. 

A couple of years later, while Bruce was visiting his cousin Brian’s apple orchard Hawke’s Bay, he reflected on the memory of the story about his friend and the doctor and decided on the gesture of giving a bucket of apples to the team and customers. What started as a few cases of apples has grown to be an annual Mainfreight tradition and we now distribute truckloads of apples and oranges all around the world.  

Added to this of course is the now famous Mainfreight buckets. There appears to be as many stories about the use of the buckets and domestic disputes about who gets the bucket, as there are about the actual origin of the tradition itself! 

So keep an eye out for your bucket of apples coming out to you soon!