Restaurants lapping up Essential stocks

David Curtis is now eyeing an export market.

"The difference between a chef and a very good chef is the quality of their stock."

So says David Curtis, who is cooking up business providing chefs with an ingredient he considers the backbone to any recipe.

The intensely flavoured, chef-grade meat stocks of Essential Cuisine have proven popular in the restaurant and hospitality industries where time and space constraints meant chefs have had to buy in more of their stocks.

Curtis believed chefs wanted plain, quality meat stocks they could use to create their own tastes. So he makes sure the business focuses on the basics.

At his commercial kitchen in Glen Innes, meat and bones are roasted, simmered (for 48 hours to get every bit of bone marrow) then reduced for three days to an extreme concentrate one third of its original volume of stock.

Core flavours include beef, chicken, fish, lamb, veal, venison and vegetable.

Finishing sauces such as "beef jus in a red wine reduction" have been added to the range, and Essential also makes pestos. All the products are free of flavourings, preservatives, gluten, salt, sugar or MSG.

Half of Essential's sales are direct to chefs, and with 95 per cent of chefs in the world using stocks, the product's potential is enormous, says Curtis.

Supermarket sales make up the other half of revenue where the stocks range in price from $5 to $12.

In that market, the challenge is educating customers on what to do with stocks, says Curtis.

"Wherever you would put water in food, you put stock, and it will quadruple the flavour."

The top 10 per cent of Kiwi foodies make up Essential's target market.

He wants to capture that same group in Sydney and Melbourne where he believes the product is unrivalled.

Not many meat stocks are reduced to the degree required by top chefs, says Curtis.

Essential Cuisine is his second food business after selling Leaning Tower of Pizza to Goodman Fielder in 1993, having built it from a small takeaway pizza outlet in Christchurch to a frozen pizza manufacturer producing more than 13,000 a day.

A trained butcher who worked as a chef in Europe, Curtis bought the company, then called Essential Stocks & Sauces, in 2000 from a chef who had started it a few months earlier in a part-time capacity.

The company now employs 10 staff and, having been self-funded so far, Curtis is eager for an investor to help take the business to export level.

Its most pressing need, he says, is a larger factory with custom-designed equipment.

Fundamentally, Essential Cuisine is about taking waste from primary industries such as bones, fish frames and heads - traditionally ground down to fertiliser - and turning them into a high-value product.

Getting brand exposure overseas is a challenge.

Attending trade shows and meeting distributors has proven to be the best strategy so far.

Small volumes are already exported to Hong Kong, Singapore and Dubai.

In five years Curtis is confident of "easily" supplying several countries in Europe and North America - and not necessarily all from New Zealand, as he believes there is potential to sell the concept.

In the meantime, he has a five-year head start on the world in the latest, most economical and productive ways to produce quality stocks.

Curtis says he has a passion for developing food businesses.

"My wife refers to me as a workaholic, but I give it 100 per cent and believe in maintaining quality.

"If you let that go you're a 'me too'."

Having tried retirement - "and didn't like it"- Curtis has every intention of seeing Essential Cuisine through its expansion overseas.