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A little-known Paeroa business has become one of the largest suppliers to the US$18 billion United States bottled water market.
Mead International, with a factory near Paeroa and offices at Auckland's North Harbour and in San Francisco, has quietly stepped into the lucrative North American export market, almost dispensing with dipping its toe into the domestic market to start with.
Mead, privately owned by the Mortimer family which has been in the export business for three generations, ships large container-loads of water from its Paeroa Bottling plant via the Port of Tauranga and Port of Auckland up to North America.
Unlike most businesses which test the waters at home before going overseas, Mead did the opposite.
The family business sells very little of its product - New Zealand Eternal - in New Zealand.
Dion Mortimer, the San Francisco-based Kiwi who heads Mead's US operations, said exports were the aim right from the start. Yet Mead was small compared to giant rival bottled water manufacturers and distributors, he said.
"We're like a drop in the ocean in the US," admitted Mortimer in New York this week where he was attending a Government-sponsored event to promote New Zealand businesses.
The bottled water widely distributed throughout the US with a koru-style symbol and a silver fern is from a deep spring just outside Paeroa.
Mead started selling to the US some years ago, aiming high at what Mortimer saw as the wealthiest consumer market in the world.
"There's a huge ability to reach a high-end consumer and so many different tiers of retailing in the US. In New Zealand, we've only really got two main supermarket chains yet here there's massive opportunities and scale," Mortimer said from the offices of New Zealand Trade and Enterprise.
The financial crisis hitting the US worries Mortimer but he said the high New Zealand dollar was far more damaging, despite his taking forward currency cover to smooth big fluctuations.
Mead may soon enter NZTE's Beachheads programme which assists Kiwi businesses in the US by providing mentors and experts in various sectors.
The programme is chaired by Seattle-based Hiwi Bridget Liddell, who is the principal of consulting firm Antipodean Equity.
Mead sells nearly 180,000 cases of bottled water annually, filling about 248 export containers.
This financial year, Mortimer estimated Mead would ship 700 containers of bottled water to the US and another 200 to Asia.
Mortimer said Mead's name came from the initials of family members: family surname Mortimer, his mother Erin, brother Andre and himself, Dion.
Anne Gibson visited New York courtesy of New Zealand Trade and Enterprise's Beachheads programme.
