Pantry door a click away

By CHRIS DANIELS

The days of mutton and three veg as the dinner of choice for New Zealanders have long gone.

Cooking shows have never been more popular, and food, wine and lifestyle publications are flooding the country.

Now the foodies' best friend is a home PC that gives access to fashionable foods, fine wines and gourmet delicacies from quail to caviar.

Computers are allowing New Zealand gourmets to stay at the cutting edge of foods and cooking trends, says Auckland man John Maidment, who established and runs a website he calls the "goodfoodgame".

His aim is to connect enthusiastic foodies to the companies looking to sell their wares.

"We are providing a conduit, a gateway to information about new Zealand products food and beverages." "If you do a search for NZ food and wine sites, you'll find thousands and thousands. How do you get around this?"

He says sorting them out needs care and that is because the very job of marketing food and wine is so difficult.

"Food and wine is incredibly complex, because of its diversity, seasonality. It includes fashion, it includes taste and habit, it includes a whole lot of things.

"There is a constant stream of products entering and exiting the market - how do you keep in touch with that?

"That is the beauty of the net. We have been asked to provide a lot of information about specialty products those things that are not normally available.



At a recent foodshow held in Auckland, he linked up four Macs with a broadband connection and stood back, astounded at the reaction from the public.

Almost all of them were already using the internet as a prime method of getting recipes, discovering new types of food and wine and generally scouring the gourmet landscape.

"People have become much more informed, have access to a much wider range of products, more and more are purchasing online.

"From our own client base, it's surprising how many order online and have it delivered to their office."

Maidment uses the example of eggplant and its arrival in New Zealand, to explain how consumers, keen to try new foods, do need help before they will make a decision to buy and cook exotic produce.

"In the early days when eggplants first came out here there were bins of it sitting in the supermarket unused. No one knew what to do with it."

It is this kind of information that the online foodie now gets from the net.

While an online foodie might be just searching for that obscure frittata recipe, people like Maidment will take the opportunity to direct them to events, such as a top New Zealand chef releasing a new range of recipes.

One small gourmet entrepreneur that has signed up with Maidment's "goodfoodgame" site is Voodoo Tuesday, a New Zealand producer and distributor of oils, spices and rubs.

Darcy Sheffield, a Voodoo Tuesday director, says the site is aimed squarely at the epicurean and food enthusiast.

The internet has allowed New Zealanders to keep up to speed on international trends, which do change quickly in the world of food and wine.

"Kiwis in particular, through the use of the internet, are much more adventurous in terms of what they are prepared to take on in terms of cooking," says Sheffield.

"They'll try things from all over the place if they can get the ingredients."

Voodoo Tuesday began as a website and online gourmet supplier, before it even began selling its products through specialist foodie stores.

"We are aiming at the enthusiast who doesn't have the time to be the enthusiast they want to be," says Sheffield.

"Our aim is to provide them with the same quality of cooking they would otherwise desire, but they can get it in a much quicker timeframe."

Foodies use the net for re-ordering foods they might have already discovered, as well as to discover new, more exotic ways of impressing dinner party guests.

"It helps keep people international, so they can really get an international flavour in what they think they are cooking and presenting to their friends. People who are on the web looking for food recipes don't limit themselves to a particular country, he says.

New Zealand did not have a staunch cuisine: "We're not French or Italian cuisine, we're Pacific Rim, and we're infusion, we're everything.

"I truly believe the internet is bringing everyone closer together and it's bringing our food closer together too."