US gets a taste for Marmite and minties

By IRENE CHAPPLE

As a kid in Wellington Tony Wilson used to charge his mother for a family ticket to his homecooked meals.

These days Wilson, with sister Sara and brother Peter, run a US$20 million ($30 million) operation just outside San Francisco.

It imports high-quality products from around the world - including New Zealand olive oil, Marmite, Kaitaia Fire chilli pepper sauce, Pascal Minties, R&J Licorice - to a receptive Californian audience.

The Wilsons' handful of ventures includes ownership of the Market Hall business and food centre, two Mexican restaurants, two gourmet food outlets called The Pasta Shop, a bakery, a fish market, catering and import businesses.

The Market Hall wine store also stocks New Zealand products, such as Allan Scott, labelled with the United States' required health warnings.

Last summer Tony Wilson opened Kaikoura Lodge and hopes to entice American tourists down to sample local venison and olive oil.

Wilson, whose mother is American, went to Berkeley University law school in the 60s.

But he tired of having to solve other people's problems. He wanted to build something more substantial than a list of cross-examination questions.

So in 1987 he and his siblings got together some cash and built the three-storey Market Hall that houses The Pasta Shop.

The terracotta building is sited in Oakland - on the east side of San Francisco's Golden Gate bridge and across the road from the Bay Area Rapid Transit train station, which spills hundreds of potential customers out of its doors every day.

California in the 1980s was beginning to embrace quality foods, with a "gourmet ghetto", as Wilson calls it, north of Berkeley.

But, with four huge supermarkets within a few kilometres of the Market Hall, the Wilsons needed to offer a worthy alternative.

"We had to provide something different and one way to do that was to stock New Zealand products ... it was a way to get people interested in things like Marmite and Minties."

It was also, he admits, a way to pay for trips back to New Zealand which he still considers home.

New Zealand food, he says, "is in many ways doing what the Americans have been trying to do with cheese ... to get closer to the old way of sourcing product, which is to get closer to the farm".

Articles in United States media praising New Zealand and its food have boosted its profile and pushed sales. "There is more of an awareness of New Zealand food and certainly of New Zealand as a wonderful place," says Wilson.

He spends around half of his time in New Zealand these days. He plans to build Kaikoura Lodge up from seven rooms to 19.

Eventually the olive oil and venison will come under Wilson's Hapuku brand, already adorning Kaikoura Lodge's cafe.