Success: Pic's spreads across the ditch

In seven years Pic Picot has gone from working in a garage to his own factory, with plans for further expansion. Photo / Caroline Crick

Peanut butter made in Nelson will be on the shelves of 700 Coles stores.

It's official: Kiwis prefer to slather their toast with locally made peanut butter.

Pic Picot, the founder of Pic's Really Good Peanut Butter, says he has knocked the multinationals out of the top spot with his peanut butter, made from Australian peanuts "lovingly squashed" in Nelson.

"And we're still growing," he says.

"The whole market for peanut butter is growing because people are coming back to eating it who had given up on it." Not only does he see space to grow the market in New Zealand, Picot has just signed up to supply the nutty spread to more than 700 Coles supermarkets in Australia.

Picot, 62, says Pic's Peanut Butter is already stocked in up to 500 speciality food outlets in Australia, after lots of time spent doing food shows and working with distributors, but those retail channels can make the product expensive for consumers.

"Coles finally cracked" about two weeks ago and confirmed its first order, says Picot.

"I was almost ready to walk away from Australia because I'd put so much effort into it and it just had seemed so difficult." Now he has Australia "sorted", the next big push is into Britain, where he has already lined up a distributor.

He's even had interest from China, where many other peanut butter brands come from, with a request for samples that could see Pic's in a chain of 30,000 service stations.

"It's hard to get your head around but you can do it.

"It's just one foot after another really [and] suddenly the zeros get added on to the end." With the Coles order absorbing much of the Nelson factory's capacity, further growth in New Zealand and the potential for another market opening up in Britain, Picot is gearing up to add a second production shift.

"We've got to be prepared for someone to ring up and say, 'right, I'd like three containers a month', and we haven't got that at the moment." Right now the factory is "squashing" three or four tonnes of peanuts into about 8000 jars every day.

It's a world away from where Picot started seven years ago, making peanut butter in his garage on Fridays to sell the next day at Nelson's farmers' market.

He'd been appalled to discover sugar was now being added to most brands of peanut butter, and after making it for friends and family, he was convinced to make it commercially.

Picot invested $10,000 in a concrete mixer customised to roast nuts, a grinder and a tonne of Australian peanuts. Then the farmers' market put pressure on him to move out of his garage and into a food grade facility.

"We had a couple of stores selling it. It was going along nicely and easily and not too much fuss and not too much money invested."

Picot says he'd made a rule to stay away from forklifts and invoicing staff, which worked nicely until the day he needed to borrow a forklift to unload a pallet of glass off a delivery truck.

"And I thought, 'ooh, that was a bit silly putting artificial restraints on'.

"I was enjoying it so I spent my retirement fund and set up a factory."

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There has never been a traditional advertising campaign for Pic's. Instead, Picot relies on converting consumers with their tastebuds and through quirky marketing. He has sponsored a flat of Dunedin students with a supply of peanut butter, run an amnesty for rival brands in exchange for a jar of Pic's (the returned product was used to bait rat traps at a wildlife sanctuary) and tours New Zealand, serving up Pic's on toast from an Airstream caravan done up to look like a toaster.

When flying back from overseas he always puts "peanut butter maker" on his customs declaration.

It's enough to pique the interest of the customs officer and convert another customer.

"That's our main thing - if we just get people to taste our peanut butter, we've got them."

A degenerative eye condition has left Picot blind in recent years. That has meant stepping back and taking a more strategic view of the business and allowing his 17 staff, including a general manager, to handle the minutiae of managing a factory and getting the product on shelves.

He's enlisted the help of The Icehouse business incubator to fill in the gaps in his knowledge as he "bumbles along", and provide some business collegiality that can be hard to find in Nelson.

Naturally, his Icehouse owner-manager group have become Pic's converts.

"It was a helluva triumph when we got the figures to show that we were the best-selling peanut butter in New Zealand," says Picot.

When he sees other people start to sell peanut butter and taking on the big guys, he realises that with a multimillion-dollar business that he hopes will top $10 million this year, he is the big guy.

The ultimate goal is to be the best-loved peanut butter in the world.

"I don't want to be the best-selling peanut butter in the world, although maybe if that happens that will be all right. I just want to be available everywhere and be talked about and loved."