KEY POINTS:
On paper, Ashley Berrysmith certainly sounds as though he lives the alternative, hippy lifestyle: a vegetarian who sells hempseed oil and mung beans and lives in West Auckland? Enough said.
But there's a lot more to him than that.
The movie Dr Doolittle persuaded him that animals were friends, not food, when he was just 12 years old. Since then, he's turned his herbivorous tendencies into a successful business and now runs the biggest supplier of packaged vegetables and salad greens in the country.
A keen eye for what's hot and a willingness to take a punt have stood Berrysmith in good stead over the 25 years he's been in business. His "Dashboard Diner Salad Shakes" - a salad mix complete with dressing, packed in a container that fits into a car drink-holder - won two gold medals at the Massey University Food Awards last year, and the design has been patented and now sells in Hong Kong and Singapore.
In 1980, then 22, Berrysmith began selling the mung bean sprouts that he grew in his parents' Titirangi garden. It was tough selling what most people considered "hippy food". Ten years on and trading as SunSprout, Berrysmith's Sproutman brand had become a mainstream supermarket product.
During the 1990s he built up a good working relationship with Progressive Enterprises-owned Woolworths and, at his suggestion, then-manager of the fruit and vegetable department Stuart Johnston agreed to stock Berrysmith's sprouts in refrigerated display cabinets. Berrysmith provided the cabinets, because until then fruit and vegetables had been displayed unrefrigerated. By 1995, all Progressive-owned supermarkets stored all their fresh vegetables in refrigerated cabinets.
Johnston, a former greengrocer in Orewa, north of Auckland, was among the first retailers to stock Berrysmith's sprouts in the 1980s.
Now divisional manager of produce for Progressive, Johnston says Berrysmith's innovation has kept him at the forefront of the market.
"He was always looking for a marketing edge. There aren't too many suppliers that have the passion to perform and deliver the produce and ideas that he does."
However, not all Berryman's risk-taking has paid off.
His first foray into salad leaves, which now make up 80 per cent of his present business, NZFreshcuts, was initially a flop. Berrysmith bagged baby leaves, rocket and mesclun salad packs, but Kiwi tastebuds weren't ready for such exotic choices and after a year the new venture was canned. The following year, feeling burned out, Berrysmith sold SunSprout and took a break from business.
He spent some time buying and renovating properties on Auckland's waterfront, but a trip to the United States rekindled his urge to get back into business.
Under the SunSprout sale agreement, Berrysmith could not sell anything green for three years, but he'd noticed that Americans couldn't get enough of bagged, peeled baby carrots, and reckoned New Zealanders would be the same. The venture was "reasonably" successful but he was hampered by the temporary moratorium on greens and had to sell all but one of his properties to keep the new business, Fraisbon Foods, afloat.
After the three years were up, he targeted salads again, this time with more success. Kiwis were now more accepting of the peppery rocket and tiny mesclun leaves.
Berrysmith was also the first to use modified atmosphere packaging - which changes the mix of gases to slow deterioration - for his produce.
Backed by Woolworths, he teamed up with Hamilton company Convex Plastics to design a bag that would allow salad leaves to stay fresher for longer. Convex came up with a modified-atmosphere, or "breathable" bag which doubled shelf life: CO2 and nitrogen are pumped into the plastic bag of vegetables and slow respiration.
Refrigeration and breathable bags are now commonplace, so Berrysmith works hard to introduce new products, spending about 5 per cent of Fraisbon's turnover on research and development.
Compared with Britain, the local fresh-cut fruit and vegetable market has hardly been touched, he reckons. In Britain, they make up about 20 per cent of supermarket produce, practically saturation point, but in New Zealand fresh-cut vegetables are only about 6 per cent of stock.
Now Kiwis are over their fear of flavour, Berrysmith is confident about introducing ingredients like mustard leaves and radicchio.
"People want spicier flavours now, tastes have definitely changed and we've come a long way since the iceberg lettuce. Even mesclun isn't exciting any more."
And as more importance is placed on fast yet healthy foods, there are still opportunities in pre-prepared fruit and vegetables, such as roast vege mixes, he says.
Berrysmith has bought back the SunSprout business and also has his fingers in several other horticultural pies, namely hempseed oil company All Seed Extractions, and manuka honey, made on his 600ha Karekare Peninsula farm.
About half of NZFreshcuts' produce comes from its own 80ha farm at Rangiriri in the Waikato. The other half comes from contracted growers, mostly around Pukekohe.
The company exports about 10 per cent of its products to Hong Kong and Singapore. Even with improvements to packaging, Berrysmith is limited to airfreighting his produce to countries that rely almost completely on imports.
Managing growth has been one of the toughest parts of being in business - Berrysmith would "rather be outside doing than inside managing". Accepting that he couldn't do everything himself meant setting up a management board and splitting the business in two.
Now, under the umbrella of NZFreshcuts, of which Berrysmith is director, SunSprout is run by ex-Convex Plastics marketer Stephen Dench, and Berrysmith maintains control over Fraisbon Foods. Noel Davies, founder of hydraulic hose and fittings company Hydraulink and 2003 Ernst & Young Entrepreneur of the Year winner, agreed to be chairman of NZFreshcuts, and the company has gone from 50 staff in 2004 to 130. Berrysmith is one of the finalists in this year's Ernst & Young Entrepreneur of the Year awards, to be decided next month.
The management workload is still higher than he'd like but it hasn't stopped Berrysmith finding time to try out new things.
His latest experiment is growing lettuces under LED lights, a clean and organic method which more than halves growing time.
