Northland is known for its beautiful beaches and fortunately for us we are surrounded by lots

and lots of turquoise sea water and golden sandy beaches. We collect our water from a

small beach nestled on the coastal highway called Cable Bay. Cable Bay is famous for

being the site where the very first telecommunication cable came ashore in New Zealand all

the way from Australia.

In high summer you will often find The Taipa Salt Pig team down at Cable Bay at high tide

collecting sea water using just a couple of stainless-steel buckets. It takes 22 buckets to fill

one of the three recycled olive barrels we use to transport the water from the beach to our

evaporators. It’s a decent workout at perhaps the most stunning natural gymnasium in the

country.

Once we get back to base its time to take a breath.

The water sits in the tanks for about 24 hours. It allows all the floaty bits to sink to the bottom and helps with the final filtration of the water before it goes into our main evaporation units.

Throughout this whole process we have had to learn and develop our processes from scrap. That has actually been one of the best parts of this whole process.

When The Taipa Salt Pig started back in 2019 it was a very simple business that put seawater into tanks and waited for the sun to evaporate it.  But as with all good things we have developed the process to make production more efficient than ever.

During those great Covid times we decided to experiment with another process. 

We imported a solar still that turns sea water into pure distilled drinking water.  The only waste product from this process was a concentrated brine that is ideal for making salt. 

So naturally the next step was to combine both processes in one place and so “Colossus” our next generation combined salt and water farm was born.

This super unit has halved salt production time and almost doubled total salt production.  It also added a new product we can market and sell in the form of drinking water. This combined unit gives us the opportunity now to really chase our goal of making salt and water right around the coast of New Zealand.

Our old evaporators

Of course we haven’t ditched our old evaporator friends, Moon Pool, Crystal Palace, North Wall, Bonneville Flats and of course Gertrud the Glorious.  They are still on site and working away quietly, but to be honest Colossus does such a good job in half the time it’s hard not to think about retiring our old friends.

Salt Vap 1

This is our flagship unit hence the flagpole!

It’s an 8m X 2.4m poly tunnel supplied by Premier Tunnel Houses Ltd. I have to say I have been impressed with the unit, its held up to some fierce storms and looks as good as it did on the day my son and I constructed it.

It sits on a clay base we dug for it with a metal base. There is room to build more units on the platform which we intend to do over the next few months.

Inside it has a large evaporation tank lined with a water tank liner and around the outside of the main tank room for a further 31 smaller food grade plastic evaporation tanks.

Salt Vap 2

This unit sits on part of our property known as Anvil knob, alongside our veggie garden. It gets sunshine from dawn to dusk and believe me it gets hot in there. We built this ourselves out of treated timber, pallet wood and clear plastic sheeting. It holds up to 44 of the small food grade plastic evaporation tanks.

This is the latest unit we have commissioned and the results so far are fantastic. It sits against a north facing retaining wall that also gets full sun all day. Our last batch which we put in on the 1st September saw us collecting salt in three weeks and six days, a new record.

I cant wait for full summer.

This unit holds 72 of the small food grade tanks. Our plan is to build two more identical units directly above this one.

So how do we get the water from the truck to the evaporators I hear you ask, you must be using a pump.

Well the answer is no.

Why consume power when you can use gravity. We simply syphon the water from the truck to the evaporators using a hose fitted with cloth filters to make sure no large particles can contaminate our salt.

Now it's just a question of being patient.

Colossus starts by using solar power to make water first, the concentrated brine it leaves behind is then placed in traditional style evaporation tanks and after 5-7 days beautiful delicate white crystals start to form.

Next it's just a question of doing as little as possible to these two products apart from packaging and adding natural flavours to add some extra interest.

It’s a peaceful and very satisfying process.