Whitebait firm fishing for sales
Company planning larger facility to boost production and sell overseas
New Zealand Premium Whitebait, the country’s only commercial whitebait farm, produced its first commercial harvest last year and is planning to invest in a larger facility this year that will enable it to step up production and start selling overseas.
The company, predominantly owned by Maori interests, was formed in 2014 to commercially farm whitebait after the know-how was developed at the Mahurangi Technical Institute in Warkworth. This enables whitebait, the juveniles of five species of fish, to be reintroduced into streams affected by Auckland’s Northern Motorway extension.
Premium Whitebait produced its first commercial harvest from its Warkworth base of about 1 tonne last year in a season running from August to December. It will soon be seeking investment for a new saltwater facility to grow whitebait at Niwa’s Bream Bay aquaculture base south of Whangarei.
The larger facility is expected to help boost production to between 20 to 30 tonnes next year, from an estimated 5 to 6 tonnes this year, and expand the length of the season, said the company’s chief executive Jeremy Gardiner
Sales last year were limited by the small production. About half went to premium local restaurants and the remainder sold in limited amounts at New World and Pak’n Save supermarkets through the Foodstuffs co-operative. However, Gardiner said the company intends to use the established networks of its distributor, Leigh Fisheries, to also test overseas markets this year, tapping prominent Kiwi chefs such as the Michelin-star awarded Matt Lambert, of the Musket Room in New York.
“We will be really picking and choosing the sort of people who have some sway in the market in terms of getting a new food product onto people’s plates and then supporting that,” Gardiner said. “It will take some time to build international markets. It’s not a product that’s very well known.”
One of NZ’s most expensive seafood, whitebait is sold overseas for about $80 a kilogram, and Statistics New Zealand data published this week showed the country exported $108,688 worth of whitebait last year.
With four of New Zealand’s five native whitebait species threatened, Gardiner expects commercial fishing of whitebait in the wild will eventually be restricted to protect the species.
He sees a good opportunity for his company to offer a sustainable supply year round.
“I think if we are able to get 50 to 60 tonnes in the next couple of years and then grow from there, there’s certainly room in the market to be quite a bit bigger than that,” he said.
The increased investment in larger facilities, while costly, will enable the company to step up production and turn a profit in the next few years.
“The nature of the fish is the bigger they get the more eggs they produce. We will have more eggs than we can do anything with for quite some time,” he said. “It will then just be down to how quickly we can build demand and then we can build production behind that and away we go.”
The company’s investors aim to fund the investment themselves if possible, said Gardiner, who is the son of Wira Gardiner, a former deputy chairman of Te Ohu Kaimoana, and Education Minister Hekia Parata.
Premium’s whitebait is sold under the brand Manaki, a Maori term referencing hospitality and care for the environment.