Bohemian touch helps cheeses sell

By DITA DE BONI

Four years ago the general manager of Puhoi Valley Cheese tried to import a herd of buffalo to New Zealand in a bid to add buffalo milk mozzarella to his range of specialty cheeses.

Although MAF torpedoed the buffalo plan, Puhoi's general manager, Corrie den Haring, reckons his line of goat and cow milk cheeses are still enough to satisfy discerning tastebuds.

From an unassuming factory just outside the picturesque township of Puhoi, north of Auckland, over $20 million worth of specialty cheeses are made each year, some of them hand-wrapped and labelled by the 55 staff.

Mr den Haring says his "hairy, audacious" plan for the company will see it churning out $45 million worth of cheese by 2005, as cheeses such as blue vein and ricotta become an increasingly common alternative to the standard Kiwi Cheddar.

The factory is soon to have a $1.7 million upgrade, following a capital injection from New Zealand Dairy Foods, which bought Puhoi Valley Cheese in November last year for $6.4 million.

With this link to the new GlobalCo "some of the regulatory constraints into export markets may be removed," says Mr den Haring.

Under the terms of its establishment, GlobalCo must sell its 50 per cent holding in NZDF, a move which Mr den Haring thinks may open even more doors for the company.

"We could become aligned with any number of large [concerns].

"We are just playing in Australia at the moment, and there is a lot to be done in the US.

"We also export to the South Pacific, which people may think is a small market, but the French in Noumea, for example, eat more Camembert and Brie than the whole of New Zealand."

Though the company's curd is now paying gold, it has had to cope with numerous speed bumps during its growth.

It was founded in 1983, making goat's milk Camembert and feta.

But it soon became apparent that goat's milk would not be a huge seller and cow's milk was added to the factory's ingredient list.

Ultra-filtration technology, brought from Scandinavia in the mid-1980s, gave the company a production boost, but it still continued to lose money in export markets.

In 1990, after Mr den Haring's arrival, the staff was almost completely replaced and the product range changed to appeal to the high end of the domestic market.

He said the change was made because there was "no competitive advantage" in going up against entrenched players.

Further spats with MAF meant that exporting was often a tricky matter for the company.

At present just 100 tonnes of the 1500 tonnes the factory produces each year is exported.

There are plans for this figure to grow, with the company's target export markets Pacific Rim countries.

But the biggest growth will come on the domestic front.

Local sales have been driven by people eating out more, changes to diet patterns and a lower price premium on specialty cheeses. These factors have seen the company's sales grow by around 25 per cent a year.

Mr den Haring also believes that New Zealanders have an affinity with Puhoi itself.

He says that Puhoi's continental heritage (it was settled by Bohemian immigrants in the 1860s), and its pastoral setting, give the company's cheese a marketing edge.

Because of that, all of NZDF's specialty cheeses will be relocated to the Puhoi site, once the factory improvements are complete.