Thinking small tastes sweet to food firm

Absolute Ingredients provides items such as pectins for special jams. Photo / Northern Advocate

A supplier of ingredients to the food industry has opened up a whole new market for itself by thinking small.

Penrose-based Hawkins Watts, which turns over $15 million to $25 million a year supplying big-name customers such as Fonterra, Frucor, and Bluebird, was constantly getting inquiries from artisan food producers who struggled to access ingredients in the smaller quantities they needed.

They didn't want to buy citric acid in 25kg bags or liquid lecithin in 200kg drums, director Paul Harrison said.

Hawkins Watts spotted a gap in the market and two months ago launched online supplier Absolute Ingredients.

Statistics showed that in 2005 New Zealand had 1400 food companies, of which 1000 were small, artisan producers, Harrison said, so there was huge potential demand for the service.

The company did a lot of work with pectins and had had a lot of interest from people doing food processing, he said.

"Previously it's been hard to supply a lot of the speciality pectins that you need for, say, low-sugar jam or for spreadable jam ... in suitable quantities."

Other than the big industrial-size lots the small producers could buy only costly small packets from the supermarket.

"We've pitched it with 5kg packs."

Harrison said the documentation such as nutritional labelling and food safety requirements were the same no matter what size pack was being sold, so Absolute Ingredients had worked on streamlining the process. "What we've done is put together a special template that has all that information."

It had also put technical information and tips for product use on its website.

Chris Ludbrook, of Ludbrook House in the Bay of Islands, which recently won a Cuisine Artisan award for its dessert figs, said all small producers would be familiar with the problem of sourcing ingredients in the right quantities.

Many like herself were rural, meaning they had to go to the city for supplies.

"A lot of the big warehouses in Auckland, you've got to make an order of $500 at a time to get free delivery."

Now she gets on the Absolute Ingredients website and her package arrives within a day or so. "When you're a small producer every little penny counts."

Harrison said Absolute Ingredients' turnover so far was modest - around $10,000 a month - but was growing exponentially.