Northland to feature at 2015 Taste of Auckland

Northland to feature at 2015 Taste of Auckland

Northland will feature strongly at the 2015 Taste of Auckland festival with eight companies to display their produce and wares at the annual food festival this week at Western Springs.

“We’re very excited to be supporting the Northland producers to attend Taste of Auckland” Northland Inc’s Business Growth manager David Templeton says.

This support signals a longer term plan to help facilitate the development of Northland as a known Food and Wine destination. “Working with a number of motivated producers, artisans and Northland food and wine advocates, we aim to reinvigorate this sector and support the development of a collaborative network under the ‘Savour’ Food and Wine Northland brand”.

“By providing some financial backing, we’ll enable Northland Food and Wine Producers to form a ‘core leadership group’ for the industry. The support includes developing a strong brand identifying the essence of the Northland industry. We’ll facilitate collaborative promotions, collective marketing, food & wine tourism, export and lots of other growth opportunities.” he explains.

Taste of Auckland will be the official launch of the ‘Savour’ Food and Wine Northland brand, with limited edition ‘Savour Sample Packs’ available to buy, featuring some of Northland’s finest flavours. Premium prize packs will also be up for grabs, with the new website www.savournorthland.co.nz keeping everyone informed.

The eight businesses are:
• Kerikeri’s Sovrano Limoncello who make their world class lemon liqueur from the best lemons in Bay of Islands.

• Fire Dragon Chillies of Hokianga who won the Ultra Hot division of the World Hot Sauce Awards with its Dragons Fury sauce for the second year running in the United States.

• Handy As, the Parua Bay company which makes disposable party plates and has come up with the concept of having food and drink in one hand through their designed recyclable plates.

• Down at the Farm, the Maungaturoto farm-based business that makes a blends of garlic, spices and salt.

• Pataua North’s Tahi Honey the producers of ethical raw and pure Manuka honey.

• Mangawhai’s Echo Valley Olives (EVO) was established in December 2002 and since then have been producing extra virgin cold-pressed quality oil and vinaigrette.

• Producers of handcrafted high quality wines Te Whai Bay Wines makes Chardonnay, Merlot, Bordeaux style reds and Pinot Gris.

• Happy Beekeeping lists its core business as Apiculture but it also produces: Manuka honey, Kanuka honey, Bush honey and Blended honey from their 500hives between Waipu and Kerikeri.

David says the Regional Business Partnership (RBP) programme has played an important role in accelerating many of Northland’s artisan food and wine producers to fully commercial businesses.

Having Northland Inc’s support in the industry is essential says Lee- Ann Hamilton of ‘Down at the Farm’.

“We feel the support of Northland Inc in creating a brand for small Producers is so important,” she says. “We are finding the biggest obstacle to growth in the food industry for small producers like ourselves is that compliance, distribution and marketing costs are no different for small businesses compared with larger ones”.

“We hope that by creating a group brand it will help reduce these costs allowing the growth for everyone in a sustainable way. Northland needs small business to create local work and industry and we believe this is instrumental in helping this happen.”

Don Windley and Teresa Anderson of Echo Valley Olives echoed similar sentiments.
“We would like to thank Northland Inc for their support for our small family business in Northland,” they say.

“The promotion as a combined group under the ‘Savour Northland Banner’ will allow Echo Valley Olives to reach out to a wider customer base, we greatly appreciate this support and encourage more Northland Food producers to join this exciting promotion of our region.”

Taste Auckland runs from Thursday 5th to Sunday 8th November.

ENDS

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