After 25 Years, Tru-Cape’s Henk Griessel Steps Back — But Not Away

At the end of July 2026, Henk Griessel officially retired from Tru-Cape Fruit Marketing after 25 years of service — a career that has left an indelible mark on South Africa’s deciduous fruit industry. True to form, he isn’t disappearing: Griessel will remain with Tru-Cape on a contract basis, continuing to lend his expertise to an industry he has spent a lifetime building.

Griessel’s path into fruit was never straight. Raised in Cape Town, he originally dreamed of studying marine biology, but a bursary from the Deciduous Fruit Board set him on a different course. “When I started, I knew nothing,” he says of those early days — an admission that belies the decades of expertise that followed.

That expertise was built the hard way. Griessel cut his teeth running a laboratory for SAAPPA in Grabouw, when large-scale controlled-atmosphere storage was being implemented. A work contract took him to Chile in the late 1980s, where he worked gruelling hours, learned Spanish, and absorbed lessons in competitiveness that would shape his approach for the rest of his career. “I realised the people out there are our competition,” he says. “We play a hard game every day — against New Zealand, America, and large parts of Europe. That forces you to take it seriously.”

He returned to South Africa to study further whilst working on the experimental farm, later completed his M.Sc. in Horticulture at Stellenbosch University in 1992 — researching the loss of green colour on Granny Smith apples — and after a stint as the pome fruit extension officer at Unifruco, he went on to lecture in horticulture at his alma mater for four years. From there, his career took him to Unifruco and Kromco before he became Quality Control Manager at Tru-Cape, where his technical authority — spanning postharvest handling, quality systems, propagation, and intellectual property in plant material — became a reference point for the industry. He has served on the post-harvest research committees at Hortgro Science since 2004.

An industry man

But colleagues describe Griessel’s real legacy as something broader than any title. After deregulation fractured the industry’s old collaborative structures, he helped rebuild them—helping others re-establish industry discussion groups such as the Packhouse Action Group and the Forelle Producers’ Association.  These helped drive the industry-wide cooperation on issues from plastics to post-harvest research. He also co-authored books tracing the forgotten history of South African apple varieties, work that took him into centuries-old Dutch archives in pursuit of the industry’s origins.

Perhaps his proudest contribution, though, is measured in people. Over the decades, Griessel has mentored well over forty interns and students, the majority of whom remain in the fruit industry today, in South Africa and abroad. “It was a privilege for me to bring people into this industry,” he says. “You build connections that last forever.”

Griessel’s story is also one of quiet resilience. In recent years, he has faced serious health setbacks, including time on dialysis and a kidney transplant — an experience that reshaped his sense of time and purpose. “Every day is there to be lived,” he says. “I can’t stand people who don’t make use of their time.” Colleagues say that same urgency and gratitude have long driven him.

Asked how he wants to be remembered, Griessel is characteristically modest: “I want to be remembered as an industry man. I don’t think I was ever exceptional — I was just part of the industry and plugged into it.”

As he steps into this new chapter, Griessel remains bullish about where South African fruit is headed, despite the pressures of logistics, energy costs, and global competition. “I think we’re close to being among the top apple-exporting industries in the world again,” he says. It’s a fitting note for a man who has spent 40 years — and counting — helping to get it there.

Roelf Pienaar, Tru-Cape’s managing director, paid tribute to Griessel’s contribution since the inception of Tru-Cape a quarter of a century ago.

“Henk’s industry knowledge is unmatched, and his fingerprints are on almost every part of how we produce and export quality fruit today. But what he leaves behind isn’t just technical expertise — it’s the people he’s trained and the standards he’s instilled across our business. I want to thank Henk for 25 remarkable years, and I’m glad he’s not going far.”

Tru-Cape Fruit Marketing extends its gratitude to Henk for his extraordinary contribution to the company and the broader deciduous fruit industry, and looks forward to continuing to draw on his expertise in the years ahead.