A very nutty business

There are nuts, nut houses and online nuts and with JC Nuts in Kerikeri all these things come together as a nutty combo.

Some would say you'd have to be, ahem, nuts to do it but owner, Jeff Cleghorn, is the largest macadamia nut producer in the district. He was part time in the business from 1982 and has been a full time macadamia farmer for over ten years now. Not bad for someone who started working life as a laboratory technician seeking out parasites in sheep, cattle and dogs.

"I lived in Masterton and used to come here for holidays. I began making furniture after the lab and when that looked like not continuing the Bay of Islands beckoned."

He found a 22-acre property near Waimate Road that had previously been used for grazing horses and growing dope until the owner was busted. In 1979 he bought it and carried on making furniture but a couple of years later up cropped, so to speak, the idea of growing macadamias.

"I went to a workshop run by Don Boyce Barnes who was keen on setting up a macadamia industry. We were the first macadamia growers to get a rural bank loan in the early eighties when kiwifruit was king. History had taught me enough to stay away from the boom products.

"We planted 1500 trees and with a team it took two-three days. We had prepared the soil with a legume and rotary hoed it. Over a period of four years we planted 15 of the 22 acres and in the beginning we had only two varieties, Beaumont and Own Choice."

He lost about a quarter of the plants when a minus four-degree frost settled in but he continued selling what's known in the industry as NIS (nuts in shell) to a co-op. He carried on making furniture and it took a decade to essentially get the crop up and running. At the end of the nineties the co-op went bust and although Jeff had been thinking about going out on his own and not relying on a co-op, it forced the issue. It was time for a change.

"We bought a vacuum pack machine, made our own labels which included bar coding and started out for ourselves," he says simply.

That meant they could make their own, um, nut cases as well. The property was fenced, sheep were brought in as lawn mowers and essentially that's the way it has remained for the past ten or so years, even in a market that has (in value terms) remained essentially static.

But JC Nuts have diversified. Jeff and his wife Daehee Ahn now produce not just a variety of macadamia nuts like unsalted, salted and Manuka honey roasted nuts but macadamia nut butter as a spread too, one of their best market sellers.

If the nut butter has novelty value, the fact macadamias contained no cholesterol and have the highest monounsaturated fats of all nuts, even higher than olive oil, is a marketing point of difference. Moreover they are a major source of essential nutrients including selenium, ellagic and phytic acids.

Not such a nutty idea after all.