The cookie monster
Christchurch and Wellington. Greenpeace’s Russel Norman popped in yesterday to talk about that, Mayell says gleefully.
Remember Cookie Time, the classic Kiwi success story? Back in 1983, Mayell dropped out of university to become a millionaire. He whipped up a batch of chunky chocolate biscuits and drove around Christchurch, persuading dairies to stock them in a big glass jar on the counter. Now Cookie Time is a multimillion dollar national institution. Mayell admits the biscuit idea was nothing special. He had seen how well the Mrs Fields brand of hot cookie stores was doing in California. But he hacked the New Zealand supply chain. Going into dairies bypassed the supermarkets, cutting out their middleman share of the proceeds. Cookie Time’s next big product, the meal replacement snack bar One Square Meal, did the same by targeting service stations.
Cookie Time has been a decent little business by New Zealand standards. And over the years, he has been burning his fair share of its profits on some ambitious gambles.
For a while there in the early 2000s, he was going to be big in straight tech.
Mayell grins and to demonstrate his love of gadgets, rushes off to grab his personal collection of hand-held devices. The first of just about everything. A Psion Organiser, an Apple Newton, the first iPod, a Motorola flip-flop cellphone. ‘‘$5000 when that came out.’’ A fan of personal growth courses – he had business mentoring from when he first started Cookie Time – Mayell launched a subscription telemessaging service in sustainability, then changing the business model is how to create real change in the world. Mayell says an example is a crowd food network – something he can see himself helping start as an experiment in a small town like Motueka or Kaitaia.
Imagine a neighbourhood where people grow food in their back gardens and cook it in their own kitchens for general sale. With an Uber or Airbnb style app, you would dial up a meal on your smartphone. Teenagers on electric bicycles could do the delivery. It would create a local economy of home-made takeaways that are ‘‘better, faster, cheaper than McDonald’s’’, says Mayell. ‘‘So Mrs Brown is going to make an extra four casseroles, put them into reusable containers. You’re going to go ‘what are we having for dinner tonight’, pull out your phone and go, ‘oh my gosh, Mrs Brown has four casseroles’ – and they’re the number one rating food on the app.’’ Health and safety? Well if Mrs Brown is giving people food poisoning, like Airbnb, everyone will soon know, Mayell replies. Likewise if bureaucracy makes it hard to use your own stove, every cafe in town has a commercial kitchen sitting idle after 3pm. Again, it is hacking the supply chain issue, he says. We are used to food production and distribution following a monolithic industrial model. So to his actual new business, Nutrient Rescue, which he has spent the past five years – and another few million of Cookie Time’s profits – getting ready for launch this year. Here Mayell says the big social goal he has identified is winding back dairy farming and intensive agriculture by giving Kiwi farmers something more ecologically-friendly to sell.