Just a detail: That's bluewater shipping, which is unbelievably cheap these days if you have the right kind of load. Some of the modern ships carry a thousand containers per crew member. The cost of the crew, fuel and ship itself is spread over many containers, and if your load has the right weight/volume ratio, you can negotiate extra low rates.
I just find it so fascinating that it can be cheaper to ship things from Europe than make them locally, even if logically I know that it makes sense.
As another example: the budget branded fries that I brought for $2 for a kg came from the Netherlands. Not only was I amazed that it was cheaper than locally made fries, but that was cheaper than I could buy fresh potatoes.
Somehow it's cheaper to grow potatoes, cut them up, package them, and ship them to New Zealand, than it is to grow potatoes in New Zealand and drive them to the supermarket.
Looking at ballpark estimates, potato chips weigh about 500 kg/m^3 [1], meaning you can fit 27 t in a shipping container [2] with some space left over, as 27 t is the maximum weight for a 40 ft container. This would cost around $4,500 to ship from Rotterdam to Auckland in a refrigerated container [3].
So per 1 kg packet, you're looking $0.17 for shipping costs. That's pretty astoundingly low.
The key word is "fresh", also termed "spillage". The potatoes you buy have to be there when you walk into the shop, fresh enough that you don't walk out again or complain. Shops throw away a lot of vegetables, even fairly robust ones like potatoes, and of course the spillage percentage is added to the price you pay. The fries are much more flexible time-wise.
You have to do that anyway: either from the port to the store, or from the field to the factory to the store.
Unless your point is that the shipping is cheap in absolute terms, in which case 'yes' :) Although I don't think it will add much. Say pizzas are shipped 500 km, on average (for the North Island - most of them will stay in Auckland, and I imagine those going to Wellington are shipped there directly). Either way, transport like that will cost you, say Eur 1/NZD 1.75/USD 1.15 per kilometer? (IIRC from the time I worked for a transport company). But you can fit, say, 50k of them in a truck. That's 1-2 cents depending on which currency you look at, and that's using lowball estimates, and not using bulk shipping discounts.
It's amazing and completely counter-intuitive how cheap shipping is. Which is also why I so dislike the 'food miles' concept. Yes, it's 3k km to drive lettuce from Spain to Northern Europe. But you can fit so many of them in a truck, that the per-item cost is tiny, and quite often offsets the extra costs you'd have to make to grow that same lettuce up north. And yes that's even when calculating in the environmental costs (depending of course on the crop and the time of year; my point: just having fewer 'food miles' doesn't necessarily make it better for the environment).
