Daisy checks out a glass bottle of milk offered by sharemilker and Bella Vacca Jerseys co-owner Gavin Hogarth. Photo / Peter de Graaf
Daisy checks out a glass bottle of milk offered by sharemilker and Bella Vacca Jerseys co-owner Gavin Hogarth. Photo / Peter de Graaf
A Northland dairy farming couple are leading the way back to the future by bringing back milk in glass bottles.
Milk produced and bottled by Jody Hansen and Gavin Hogarth is already sold in one-litre glass bottles under their brand Bella Vacca Jerseys at more than 30 outlets as far away as Auckland.
The next step in the couple's plans is to bring back home deliveries, initially through online orders in the Bay of Islands, Whangārei and Auckland.
Hansen and Hogarth have been sharemilking on a Goodhue family farm in Pokapu, near Moerewa, for the past nine seasons. They currently have 160 jersey cows.
Bella Vacca Jerseys co-owners Jody Hansen and Gavin Hogarth on the farm at Pokapu, near Moerewa. Photo / Peter de Graaf
A drop in the Fonterra milk payout about three years ago forced Hansen to seek accounting work off the farm to make ends meet, and prompted them to rethink the business.
''We weren't making money, we were going to have to borrow just to keep farming,'' Hansen said.
''We thought, let's move from being price takers to having some control over the income we get from our milk.''
Unable to compete on price with supermarket brands they opted to sell their own milk in glass bottles, both as a point of difference and to be kinder to the environment. Their milk is pasteurised but not homogenised or standardised.
The couple started with a 300-litre pasteuriser, selling their first bottles in May last year from what was then Nosh in Waipapa.
They have since upgraded to a 500-litre pasteuriser and now supply 34 outlets, including butchers, greengrocers and markets, between Houhora and Auckland. They also supply cafes with milk in plastic pails which are sterilised and re-used.
Bella Vacca employee Amy Deal washes and fills the glass bottles by hand. Photo / Peter de Graaf
A new 1000-litre pasteuriser is due to arrive from Greece in November to handle growing demand.
''People love it. The older generation remember glass bottles, the younger generation love it because it's not plastic,'' Hansen said.
While any money they've made so far has been ploughed back into the business Hansen no longer has to work full-time off the farm, and they have employed three full-time and two part-time helpers.
It's a labour-intensive business because the bottles are filled, sterilised and washed by hand. Each bottle can be re-used about 50 times.
''A bottling machine that can do it faster than us costs as much as a house,'' Hansen said.
Hogarth said they were currently producing 20,000 litres a month.
''That's 250,000 plastic bottles a year that don't even have to be made. We just can't keep living the throw-away society,'' he said.
