Lisa King.
I walked into the conference room to find five glasses already arranged on the table, each partially filled with clear liquid of unknown provenance. Sitting behind them was Lisa King.
She watched me closely as I sipped each one and attempted to guess its ingredients. I knew at least one of the glasses would contain her new non-alcoholic gin and tonic substitute but had no idea what might be in the others.
I had been intrigued by the pre-launch publicity for this new business venture, given it was so different from Eat My Lunch - the social enterprise aimed at feeding hungry children which made her famous - and given that it included this line: "Uses a special natural ingredient called 'Afterglow' to mimic the feeling of drinking alcohol."
"How would you rate your palate?" King asked, as I took my first sip.
"Poor," I said reflexively, then, as I thought more about it, I added, "... to very poor." Although I drink a fair amount of gin and tonic during the warmer months, and I like fancy things as much as the next person, I have never been able to say with much confidence what's in something, or whether it's any good.
Having said that, the first drink was sweet and so obviously non-alcoholic that I considered lying and saying "Not sure about that one" or similar, so as to not hurt her feelings.
The second drink smelled like booze but on sipping it, I thought otherwise. Then, a few seconds later, I got an afterglow, which made me think it was probably booze.
The third one tasted like booze but I wondered if I might be confusing the bitterness of the tonic for the sting of booze. The drink wasn't as sweet as the other two. I said: "I'm not sure I'm getting a strong sense of alcohol from any of these but probably more so from that one than the first two."
The fourth drink was wildly different. It was bitter and brackish, like drinking directly from the forest floor. I guessed it was real gin. The fifth and final drink was a return to the sweetness of the first.
She asked which of the five was my favourite.
I said: "I think, as a drink, I quite like the first one but I think as a booze drink - there's something about the conviviality of booze, the feeling of it - I think maybe number three." I took another sip of it. "Yeah," I said, "I feel like number three's got booze in it, and I like that about it." I told her I thought both number one and number five were hers.
Predictably enough, I turned out to be wrong. Number three, the one I thought was most booze-like, was hers. The drink I liked least, number four, the forest-floor tasting one, was one of her main competitors, the non-alcoholic Seedlip. The other three were all pre-mixed gin and tonics, of varied brand, containing real booze. The whole thing couldn't really have worked out any better for her.
The reason I found myself sitting in a conference room doing a blind taste test with a range of booze and booze substitutes with arguably New Zealand's foremost social entrepreneur, was because in February this year, she decided to stop drinking and shortly after that realised she didn't have much to drink.
She says a recent experience at an elite Auckland restaurant was indicative. "There was literally a kombucha, a lemonade, then the lady said: 'We can mix maybe apple and orange juice for you'."
"It was not good," she says.
She had made the decision to quit drinking after realising alcohol appeared to be a contributing factor to the vertigo she'd recently started experiencing. At the same time, a lot of people she knew who had temporarily given up alcohol were telling her how much better they were feeling: sleeping better, feeling more energetic, able to think better and last longer during the day.
So she decided to start her own drinks brand, making pre-mixed non-alcoholic gin and tonics for people who don't want to drink but also don't want to be patronised. It's called AF, which is an acronym standing for "as f***". On the day we met, King was wearing a T-shirt reading "Boss AF".
"I'm the only one who has this shirt," she said.
She hasn't given up the booze completely. She says she might still have a glass of something alcoholic on a really special occasion, or when someone's bought a special bottle of wine. The idea of AF is not to encourage people to go teetotal, she says, rather to encourage a more mindful approach to drinking. It's not the drinking, it's how we're drinking.
She cites noted non-drinking celebrities like Pharrell Williams and Bradley Cooper, who she says remain true to themselves while still being central to any party they attend.
"We all think we need alcohol to let go of these inhibitions, but if you really think about it, alcohol brings up a part of you that isn't really you and, without it, when you go to a party and watch everyone else getting drunk, you kind of say, 'But actually…'"
King is best known for jacking in her successful corporate career to start the phenomenally successful Eat My Lunch, which distributes a free lunch to a needy child each time an adult buys one for themselves.
She grew up in a privileged home. Her parents arrived in New Zealand from Hong Kong as immigrants when King was 2 and were well off, with a successful restaurant in Epsom. They offered to buy her her own business when she was 16 but she said no, because she wanted to go to university. There, she did well enough to be recruited by Fonterra into a management role and was sent to work in the Philippines.
Her parents made plenty of money but they were also generous with it. New immigrants were often coming to their home, King says. Her parents would help them settle in, give them advice, help them find housing, get their children into schools, drop food off for them. Sometimes, if their visitors didn't have furniture, her parents would buy it for them.
She first encountered extreme poverty In her teenage years, during trips to Buenos Aires and India, during which she drove through slums lined with shacks of unimaginable squalor. As an adult, arriving in Manila to start work for Fonterra, things were even worse. She was living the luxury lifestyle of the "expat", but could look out her window and see shacks next door. At work too, she says, she was surrounded by people who lived in poverty.
We are often encouraged to see New Zealand as a world apart from places like these but the existence, importance and rapid growth of Eat My Lunch - 1.5 million free lunches delivered to needy kids over five years - shows it's not.
King has delivered lunches to schools in parts of Auckland she once knew nothing about, where the schools have huge fences, constant security issues and regular visitors trying to sell alcohol and drugs to the students. She says it's like being in an American-style ghetto, like being in a movie.
"It still takes a lot to get - not even comfortable - but used to the fact it does happen," she says. "And having your own kids, you can't imagine them in that situation."
She describes the hypocrisy of many of the wealthy people who live outside that world and turn a blind eye to it. "They're on extravagant holidays and you're like, 'If you could give me just 10 per cent of what you're spending on that holiday, I could actually feed all of these kids.'"
She says with privilege comes responsibility. "We see that with Eat My Lunch," she says. "People really want to help. We've had more than 25,000 volunteers over the past five years. People really want to give something back. It's the same for business. Business is responsible too. It shouldn't just be 'Once we've made some profit we'll donate 5 per cent to charity, our good is done.'
"Business has such a great ability, as we've shown through Eat My Lunch, to actually have impact at a real scale that a lot of other organisations can't or individuals can't. My gripe with business is that we tend to celebrate people who make a ton of money and we think that's success. For me, I do think businesses have an obligation - whether it's to the planet or environment or it's people or it's community - and that should be first and foremost why they exist."
The gap between her attempts to alleviate childhood hunger and her attempt to develop fancy non-alcoholic drinks may appear wide but she says the commonality is social impact. With everything she does, she says, she asks herself what's a big social problem and how might it be solved?
"I did a lot of research around the impact of alcohol on society," she says. "There isn't a domestic violence call-out that doesn't involve alcohol. Drink driving ... the impact of alcohol is massive and it's one of the biggest contributors to health issues globally. I could bore you with that very serious 'Alcohol is bad for you'; but that's not what we want to do with this, because in the same way not everyone's going to just stop eating meat suddenly, this is about helping people become more aware and mindful."
She says that, while AF sprang from her personal recognition of the lack of alcohol-free drink options, she wouldn't have done it if she couldn't have found a way for it to have social impact.
"It would have been a waste of my time," she says. "For me to do anything, it needs to make a positive difference in the world."
She moved house a couple of weeks ago, from a 120-year-old Grey Lynn cottage to a larger place in Sandringham, more capable of accommodating the needs of her growing children, 13 and 11.
As she did, they have grown up in privilege, watching their mum do what she can to help those not so privileged. The lives of her family, geographically so close to those she helps, could hardly feel more distant. But once you've seen that gap, as she has, it's hard to ignore.
She already has an idea for another project, once she's done what she needs to do with AF. She won't say what it is, but says it's related to poverty, "More towards what Eat My Lunch has been doing."
She knows she can't do everything, but that won't stop her doing something. She tells a story about a lunch she delivered during lockdown: "There was a little boy at a primary school in Onehunga - so we're not talking South Auckland but a pretty wealthy part of Auckland - at a decile 3 school. We give 60 lunches a day to that school. They've only got 240 kids. This 7-year-old boy, he's living in a house with his dad who's just come out of prison, with other gang members and there's drugs and things going on. It's frustrating because you can't do anything. But then it just does kind of fire me up to go: 'What else am I going to do?'"
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