New Year Honours: Vogel's maker a natural hit

By RICHARD PAMATATAU

In an age of culinary celebrity, where TV cooks talk up the merits of fancy lettuce and the latest herbal dressing, good old Vogels bread continues to find its way into Kiwi shopping bags from Cape Reinga to the Bluff.

The man who brought Vogel's to New Zealand, Johan Klisser, has been named a Member of the New Zealand Order of Merit for services to baking and to our lunches.

When Klisser, a Dutch migrant, arrived here 50 years ago, he first worked for health bread maker Dr Reizenstein, a Jewish refugee with a bakery in Ponsonby.

At the time, he recalls, "there was white or wholemeal bread, which was coloured brown by the addition of caramel", and that was it.

But Reizenstein's bread was "a loaf with a dough almost like a porridge with natural fermentation, and a combination of barley, oats and rye. It was natural, very tasty and always left you longing for the second slice."

That love of good bread soon led Klisser and his wife, Jenny, to start Klissers Farmhouse Bakery - and New Zealanders flocked to buy their products.

When the bakery started in the 1950s they were making just 1200 loaves a week.

By the time they sold out to conglomerate Goodman Fielder in 1990 the company was producing more than 500,000 loaves of Vogel's a week as well as several other varieties.

Their success, they believe, was because they always stuck to their principles and used only natural products.

At one stage, for instance, they turned down a lucrative contract to be bun maker for fast-food company McDonald's.

"Why," asked Jenny Klisser, "would we make a bun that was 70 per cent sugar and went against all our principles?"

The pair could have retired on the dough they made from the sale but they instead have turned to farming in the Mackenzie Country at historic Haldon Station, raising merino sheep, deer and cattle.

Would they go back to baking?

Not at all, declare both Klissers.

After 13 or so years at Haldon, they say, they are just scratching the surface of another way to bring the best out of the land and take it to the tables of the world.