FRUITS OF THEIR LABOURS
LIFE COULDN’T BE SWEETER FOR A SOUTH AFRICAN COUPLE WHO MOVED TO CROMWELL 16 YEARS AGO TO MAKE JUICE THE OLD-FASHIONED WAY
Wayne and Sandra Noble live a fruitful life in Cromwell
THE BENJER TASTING room in Cromwell is ideally placed to catch thirsty travelers on their way to the holiday spots of Alexandra, Wanaka and Queenstown. It also allows Wayne and Sandra Noble a view of Lake Dunstan’s aqua expanse and all the summer holidaymakers who jet-ski, swim and sail upon it.
But summer is no holiday for them. It’s their busiest time, picking, juicing and bottling fruit — not that they care. “When the business is yours, you’re thinking about building it up, securing your future for those retirement days, so putting the effort in now isn’t an issue,” says Wayne. “I would be bored otherwise.”
With a business that includes Benjer Drinks, condiments brand Provisions and a picturesque orchard, boredom would be a luxury. Benjer’s itself offers 10 juice options, while Provisions produces 15 jams and chutneys, along with a spice rub. Then there’s the picture-perfect cherry orchard, which yields shiny crimson fruit for sale (any seconds are redirected into Provisions’ chutney pots and Benjer’s juices).
The Benjer story is one of growth, diversification and a consonant swap. It begins in 1995 when an apple orchardist in Dunbarton (a hamlet so small the company’s beginnings are usually ascribed to Ettrick, another slightly larger village on the banks of the Clutha/Mata-Au River) had a waste issue.
“The orchardist, Bruce McGregor, decided to make cider, but there were still too many apples. So he started making apple juice as Benger Gold,” says Wayne. (Note the “g”, named for nearby Mt Benger.) In Cromwell, 75 kilometres up State Highway 8, Tony Butson was bottling mineral water from the Pisa Range. Tony and Bruce joined forces and moved the juice operation onto its current Cromwell site in 2000.
Wayne himself joined Benger (still spelt with a “g”) in the first days of 2003, having newly arrived with Sandra and their two children from South Africa. He had given up his job with Appletiser to move countries.
“I’ve done almost nothing else in my life other than work in apple juice and fresh juices; first as an accountant then moving to sales and marketing.”
Abnormal, perhaps, but it made him the ideal man to take over the running of a juice business in need of new blood. “I applied for a job as a sales rep, but Tony wanted to step back from running the company, so I ended up starting down here as general manager.”
Over the next few years, Wayne and Tony bought out the orchardist and other small shareholders. Today Wayne runs the business day to day, with Sandra operating the tasting room and retail sales, and Tony chipping in on major decisions. And they’ve made quite a few in the past few years, including a name change and rebrand in 2015. “People couldn’t pronounce the name,” says Sandra. “Was it a hard or soft ‘g’? We didn’t want to change the name because it’s well known, so we decided to spell it with a ‘j’ to be less confusing.”
That same year they bought Provisions, bringing production of its fruit-based jams and condiments to their current 300-squaremetre site, where — along with the tasting room — all products are processed, bottled and warehoused. Cider is still produced there, too, under the Incider label.
Then, in 2016, Wayne saw an orchard for sale on nearby Ripponvale Road, and with “Benjer at the stage where it could wash its own face”, he decided he needed a challenge. “Going into the orchard was completely foreign — I come from the city, I had never worked in an orchard or anything like that.
“But I love my time outside. It’s very different being in the open at minus-five degrees pruning trees to sitting in a warm office. However, the reward of seeing the fruit come off the trees makes it worth it.”
There’s plenty of variety still growing in what’s now called the Provisions Orchard. “When we first saw it, my daughter called it a ‘fruit zoo’. It had cherries, boysenberries, raspberries, plums, pears, greengages, feijoas — enormous feijoas — and even gooseberries, so I figured there was a lot we could use. But I soon realized for Benjer and Provisions we need a lot more fruit than we can grow, so the cherries are the main value to us.”
The cherries, espaliered with precision for easy picking, are exported or sold locally, with process-grade fruit used for Provisions and Benjer’s Cherry and Apple Juice. “We’re quite unique in terms of cherry growers in that we have an outlet for our process-grade fruit.”
The Nobles are determined to use as much of their orchard fruit as possible. Son Gareth — who trained as a chef, then became a barber (and was a Married at First Sight participant) — developed the feijoas into a popular Provisions conserve. “Our philosophy is that ‘this is from our orchard, and New Zealand is our orchard’. We have just taken the fruit and put it in a bottle for you,” says Wayne. “We make our juice the old-fashioned way like our grannies did.”
But producing in a traditional way doesn’t mean he’s not looking for new ways of doing things or new products to offer. “I enjoy doing something new, something that’s a challenge. I guess it has to be in our blood — you don’t come halfway across the world to a little town called Cromwell, where you know no one, to take up the challenge of running and owning a company without relishing a challenge.
“There have been some hard years, but we’ve hung on and now we’ve built Benjer into a strong company with a sweet future.”