Sky’s the limit for Moreish business expansion plans

A Palmerston North food supplier’s big expansion plans are taking off with a new facility and a meaty partnership with a major airline in the works.

September was a good month for free-range butchery Moreish.

The company recently moved from its Broadway Ave site into a facility it built on El Prado Drive, near the airport. Earlier in the month it was shortlisted in the search for Virgin Australia’s new supplier. Co-owner Nicola Fitzsimons said the new facility would allow them to process and deliver larger volumes of meat, so they could chase new and bigger clients. This extra capacity, and some cheeky Kiwi confidence, helped land Moreish on Virgin’s shortlist, she said.

The Fitzsimons family started Moreish in 2009 as a boutique butchery but last year closed the store to focus on online sales and wholesale supply contracts.

The backbone of the shift has been a partnership with meal delivery service My Food Bag, who they have been a key supplier of for four years.

Fitzsimons hoped to expand the business and hire new additions to the eight-person staff over the next year or two.

Virgin released a video in July announcing a search for a Kiwi supplier for its new in-flight menu. The video asked Kiwi producers to apply with 200 words or less on why their meat should be selected.

Instead, the Moreish team put the same information in a cheeky parody of Virgin’s video, uploaded it to Youtube and sent in the link. ‘‘We even threw in a cheeky reference to that old Australian tourism ad – ‘Where the bloody hell are ya?’... It certainly grabbed their attention.’’

Virgin’s search was part of its preparations to go head-to-head with Air New Zealand on transtasman flights, from October 28, after the Kiwi company decided to end their seven-year codesharing partnership.

Moreish will find out by the end of the month if its bid was successful. But even if Moreish missed out, simply being shortlisted had already worked out well for the company. The process had raised their profile significantly, and Moreish had fielded several new inquiries from large companies over the past few weeks, Fitzsimons said.