Every apple you bite into — there's a good chance a pair of Pacific hands picked it. We hit the orchards and the WestSide streets of Hastings to find out what life's really like for the RSE workers who call Hastings home.

9 Pacific Island nations get the goods as part of the RSE scheme. Samoa, Tonga, Fiji, Vanuatu, PNG, Kiribati, Tuvalu, Nauru, and the Solomon Islands are the nations New Zealand relies on — mostly because our own are too busy on the vapes to do any kind of picking, thinning, pruning or packing. Yeah, I said it.

Around 5,000 workers are based in Hawke's Bay each season and once the end-of-day whistle goes, those workers like to chill out, max and relax WestSide Hastings — a few blocks away from their accommodation.

Without them, we wouldn't have the season-by-season certainty that our hort bosses need to keep the containers exporting. No big deal, really.

I can feel our Kiwi generation getting jealous of the island life already, but remember — that hard work part.

We come to work so life for our family gets better.

Westside City is the place we love most. Hastings is sweet.

Hastings is a truly wonderful place.

After a long day in the orchard, it's WestSide. Heretaunga Dairy for chicken and chips, a cold drink and a yarn with mates in the laneway. Where the Solomon Islander, the Fijian, and the Vanuatuan end up on the same wall, laughing about the same foreman, sending money home at Cash Connectors on the same app.

Some workers have been returning to the same Hawke's Bay orchard for 10–14 years — so they've done more years of hard work than some of the residents here have had jobs.

Without the RSE workers, the region would be much poorer — and WestSide would be a vanillarised, generic, hipster kitset version of itself.

Vinaka. Tankyu tumas. Fa'afetai lava. 🌺