From The Salt Barons Desk - Happy New Year!
Barons Blog January 2020
Welcome to a new decade my fellow salt fans.
What a year 2019 was for The Taipa salt Pig. Business officially kicked off on the 19th January 2019 and its been onward and upward from there. The initial thrill of going to markets, finding stockists and selling salt online was quickly followed by the realisation that salt supply was not going to match the high demand for our salty delicacy!!! It was a good problem to have in our first year because it gave us time to breath, assess and refine all our processes, and more importantly gave time to allow us to build some new evaporators, which have now doubled production. Congratulations again to the winner of our evaporator naming competition, Abby Bagnall from Russell, who submitted the winning name “Gertrude The Glorious” and glorious she has truly been.
After the winter hiatus spring kicked off with all evaporators up and running, and with that sudden boost in production we were ready for our first foray into a large-scale food festival. Our experience at Taste Of Auckland over the four days of the show was fantastic. Two weeks of frantic flavouring and packaging was followed by four days of taking “The Taipa Salt Pig” to the masses of Auckland. Sales record after sales record tumbled and we left Auckland having met a ton of enthusiastic foodies who loved our salt, found a couple of really cool new distributors and more importantly managed to sell a massive amount of stock.
Marco Pierre White fell victim to our salty stand’s sunshade.
Taste Of Auckland really kicked off our season and the business just rolled on into Christmas. Three markets a week really tested our production team, as did the addition of two new stockists. But thankfully the team were up to the challenge and we managed to fulfil all our orders on time. We even had time to refine our market stand image under the guidance of our jet-setting “Brand Manager” who had jetted back to New Zealand from London for Christmas and specifically to undertake this task. The stand now looks a lot less cluttered and we have a few more sustainable gift pack options now available on-line or at market that we think are pretty cool. I guess nothing ever stands still in business, and while sometimes its hard to see the much loved signs you carefully made on Microsoft Publisher get casually tossed in the bin, sometimes you just have to accept that the younger generation may well know what they are doing when it comes to this sort of thing.
So where to from here I hear you ask? Well hopefully its onward and upward. We now have our eco packaging sorted. We had a few glitches with the compostable cellophane bags used in the variety packs, but we think we have those issues sorted now. Similarly, the Bees Wax bag options we trialled before, during and after Christmas have gone well with nothing but positive feedback. In February we will be attending “Meatstock” in Auckland at the ASB Showgrounds. The Music and Barbecue festival runs over two days, 15-16 February, and we are really looking forward to showing off our little product to a host of new potential customers. Check out Meatstock online and keep your ears to the ground for a Meatstock competition coming up. On the 14th of March we will be back at the Mangonui Waterfront Festival, we had a great day there last year so we are hoping for a repeat performance this year.
So for now its time to keep our heads down, make sure our evaporators are fully stocked and keep churning out salt while the sun shines. Our first market back for 2020 will be this weekend at Kerikeri on Saturday the 4th. If you need a top up come and see us at the market.
We sincerely hope you all had a wonderful Christmas and that 2020 will bring you all much joy and happiness.
The Pig Says Cheers