Peep inside the food show you weren’t invited to

Sunday, 6 July 2025

Distiller Philip Riley from Arrowtown’s Rifters Gin pours a taster of the company’s Royal Gin at the Fine Food New Zealand Show in Auckland.

It’s strong stuff at 57.7% proof, making it “navy” grade. He offers a mixer, but it’s such a fragrant, palatable snifter that it would be a shame to dilute, and I tell him so.

Thanks, he replies, then says it won the award for the World’s Best navy gin at the Gin Awards in London last month.

New Zealand has world class food and drinks producers, and many of them were represented in the show at the Auckland Showgrounds last week, though perhaps no other such recently proclaimed world champions as Riley.

It was not a show the public was invited to. The masses are welcome at the Auckland Food Show at the showgrounds between July 24 and July 27, but Fine Food was a strictly business-to-business event where supply deals are done. Ticket-buyers had to produce credentials to show they were in the hospitality industry.

It has been a horrible few years for the hospo sector, hit hard first by Covid lockdowns and then an inflation and mortgage-driven cost-of-living crisis.

Fine Food was a barometer of how the industry was feeling.

The predominant sentiment at the last Fine Food in 2023 was uncertainty, said Rob McPhee, owner of the Auckland-based Produce Company.

This year, he expects hospitality to improve as lower mortgage rates filter through leaving households less cash-strapped, while farm-boom money should also start to make its presence felt.

But dining wouldn’t return to quite the same level as it was in the halcyon days before Covid and government policy wreaked havoc, and Fine Food was temporarily put on ice.

The diner would stay cost-conscious, nights out would remain more infrequent, and there would be fewer big spenders, McPhee predicted.

Rebecca Stewart, group director for XPO Exhibitions, which owns both Fine Food and the Auckland Food Show, said there were 220 exhibitors at the show, and there was more energy than in 2023.

More money, and effort, had gone into exhibition stalls for the roughly 7000 visiting business owners to browse.

Fine Food has a less frenetic, more relaxed feel than the annual Auckland Food Show, which sees 25,000 to 30,000 hungry members of the public buying tickets.

There’s much more elbow room, little queuing, and eftpos machines are discouraged at Fine Food.

“A lot of order-taking is happening, but not individual sales,” Stewart said. “Some of them do try it on. They want to make a quick buck, but actually our policy is not to do it because they're missing out on the bigger sale by doing that.

“They sell the $10 item, but they're missing out on the person who actually wants the $10,000 order,” she said.

Fine Food’s visitors are VIPs. Wholesale food supplier Gilmours, which is owned by Foodstuffs North Island and has three cash-and-carry stores, provided canvas bags for business-owners to carry away their free samples.

Virtually limitless sample-snacking was on offer, and food and equipment companies demonstrated how their products could be used.

The hospitality industry is large and has aspirations, it says, now it no longer has to try to deal with a Labour/Greens government.

Matt Padernal from industry lobby group Hospitality NZ, told business owners in a pitch at Fine Food’s seminar space that the sector employed 170,000 people, and turned over $13 billion-a-year.

But it was an industry that did not feel beloved of careers advisers or, many felt, the last government. Memories of Covid lockdowns and former Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern still provoked strong feelings.

Padernal and Hospitality NZ president Kristy Phillips were hopeful alcohol law reforms they have been pushing for would be announced later this year, including allowing bars, hotels and restaurants to accept digital identity cards as proof of age.

A digital version of the Kiwi Access Card would be launched later this year, they said.

But the hospo industry is braced for a fight with anti-alcohol groups. Phillips said alcohol harm was largely centred on off-licence sales, not in the nation’s restaurants and bars.

One of the joys of Fine Food is the start-ups. Stewart said Fine Food had special, lower pricing for younger food and beverage operators looking to introduce themselves to the sector.

Tesh Hearth, founder of the Raglan Food Co, which grew to be the largest employer in the Waikato town, was showcasing her new venture; ethical chocolate company Weave Cacao, which is launching a nationwide competition to find the best amateur chocolate mousse maker. The company sources its cocoa direct from growers in Papua New Guinea.

There was Sidekick Soda from Wānaka with premium strawberry, plum and cherry sodas.

There was the the Better Tea Company which sold hand-sewn tea balls that unfurl into flowers in the pot, and glitter tea which swirls with food-grade mica-based pearlescent pigment.

There was Amanda Boock’s The Chiller, an Auckland-based online store that only sells non-alcoholic beers, wines and spirits, including the first zero-alcohol Irish cream, though it’s not allowed to be marketed as such as multi-national drinks company Diageo owns that trademark.

Not all innovation was from new businesses.

There were about 70 new product launches at the show, Stewart said, including from equipment makers, and from large, sometimes multi-national brands including Wattie’s and Mainland, which had some of Fonterra’s 70-strong army of chefs doing demonstrations.

Dilmah was showcasing a range of concentrated tea elixirs that could be made into iced tea, or used in cocktails. They sold for a little over $12 to trade, but there were no plans to get them into shops.

And had the public been allowed in, they would have had their eyes opened to a few secrets of the hospitality trade.

Those cafe eggs and restaurant mashed potatoes may well come out of a Zeagold or Wattie’s bag, and those cute little pastry shells filled with mousses and creams at cafes, may have been baked in a state-of-the-art kitchen in the Philippines.

Many of the newer businesses at Fine Food aspired to being supplied in one or both of the two supermarket giants ‒ Woolworths, which owns the Woolworths, Countdown, Fresh Choice and SuperValue brands, and Foodstuffs, which owns the New World, Four Square and Pak‘nSave supermarket brands.

For many, being in the supermarkets was the difference between staying small and becoming a household name.

Some up-and-comers were happy to talk about the big two, but only if not named.

One new-to-supermarket beverage maker confided that the biggest challenge was the margins the duopoly demanded, ranging from 30% to upwards of 50%, when “rebates” and “promotions” were included.

The Commerce Commission’s supermarket commissioner, established to try and give suppliers a fairer go with the outsized power of the duopoly, has proposed to ban major supermarkets chains from charging grocery suppliers “rebates, discounts, and promotional payments” that add up to $5 billion a year.

The two biggest crowds at the seminar area were for Sarah Frizzell, whose Lucky Taco kits are sold by Foodstuffs, and Woolworths’ category manager Eve Dhar. Both were billed as offering tips on how to get onto the supermarkets’ shelves.

Neither pulled their punches.

The exuberant but blunt Liverpudlian, Frizzell, told the story of The Lucky Taco from its genesis on a road trip in Mexico with co-founder and husband Otis to a food truck on the trendy Ponsonby Road, to the shelves of New World and Four Square.

It was hard. It was gruelling. It was marketing-led. It was inevitable. It took more than 10 years to break into the supermarkets, she said.

“If you're that kind of person, and that's the way you're wired, you're going to do it anyway, despite what people to say. Our family got all crazy. No-one thought it was going to work, and it takes a lot of time.”

It was journey through personal limitations, gaps in knowledge, and ever-changing business plans.

“It keeps changing and you keep changing,” she said.

“We've actually mentored lots of people through food trucks and were like, ‘Go for it’,” she said.

Then she laughed good naturedly. “Poor bastards.”

Dhar tried to be encouraging, but didn’t want to talk about Woolworths’ margins.

“I often say, ‘Don't worry about trading terms’,” she said. With a good, well-priced product, those terms could be nutted out later.

There was a lot to think about, she said; What’s the selling point? How crowded is your category? What is on trend? What’s your shelf life? How will you package it? What are your sustainability credentials? What’s your price?

“You could have the best product in the world, but if it’s retailed for $20, and the rest of the market is at $10…”

The sentence didn’t need finishing.

Try to win some awards, and get celebrity chefs to use your products in recipes, she suggested.

The power of the supermarket duopoly was a theme among the food and beverage makers hoping to go big, and maybe one day take their wares to markets overseas.

Some didn’t think the supermarket giants gave small Kiwi suppliers a good enough deal, and one founder said limited ability to get to market was holding back the value-add the economy needed.

Andy Macdonald, owner of Black Dog Furniture, provides macrocarpa bar and dining furniture to homes, bars and cafes around the country and is a proud proponent of “Buy NZ Made”.

The company, based near Cambridge in the Waikato, can turn a few hundred dollars of timber from a farm into jobs and profit.

“We can turn $500 of timber into $15,000 of products,” Macdonald said.