White gold
TWO OLD MATES WITH A SHARED GOAL ARE SHAKING UP NEW ZEALAND'S PLANT-BASED MILK MARKET
P HOTOGRAPHS
ONCE UPON A TIME, there was a young, ambitious New Zealander called Tim Ryan. He lived in the glamorous cities of London, Amsterdam and New York and worked in the fast-paced world of communications, but he was always hungry for something else. One day, while supposedly living the dream in Amsterdam, he woke up and thought, “What I really want to do is go home and make oat milk.” So that’s what he did.
Where does the oat milk come into it? Well, that’s a story in itself.
“Funnily enough, it all starts with Tim’s vegan ex-girlfriend,” Tim’s business partner Chris Wilkie says. “That’s where the idea came from.”
The tale begins a decade ago when Tim moved to London. He was new in town, and his head was turned by the hip café across the road, which used a brand of Swedish oat milk.
“I was struggling to adapt to the lifestyle changes of living in London - in New Zealand I’d been living in Queenstown - and I decided to try going vegan. When I tasted this oat milk in my coffee, I was sold straight away. It was lighter and had a caramel-y flavour. I thought, ‘Wow, oat milk. I could do that in New Zealand.’”
Oat milk was a niche product in those days, but it has since developed a cult-like following. Oats are high in fibre, minerals and antioxidants, and they’re linked to a reduced risk of heart disease. Oat milk contains about half the fat of its dairy equivalent and requires far fewer inputs for production.
Tim, who grew up on a Canterbury sheep, deer and cropping farm, knew that New Zealand could grow oats well. But then life and work intervened. He moved to Amsterdam and headed Nike’s global communications. His dreams of making oat milk took a back seat until he came back to New Zealand for a holiday in 2015.
“That’s when the penny dropped. We drove across the Canterbury Plains to my family’s holiday house at Lake Ōhau. It used to be beautifully green and rolling with lush heritage farms, and all of a sudden it was bulldozed land with centre-pivot irrigators, covered in grass that grows in 10 days. It really scared me.”
He went back to Amsterdam but started using the downtime on transatlantic business flights to develop a plan. While working on an ad campaign in New York, something snapped.
“I was totally rinsed out. I’d fallen out of love with the creativity, and that was the one thing that kept me going. I missed home and the mountains. So, in December 2017, I quit my job, broke up with my girlfriend and delivered my belongings to a friend in London so I could come back to New Zealand. I thought it was time to do something that mattered.”
A friend needed a shepherd on his south Westland station, so Tim went straight there and worked for six months to reset. “Then I broke my wrist, which forced me to move back to Christchurch and start my foray into product development.”
By this time, his worldly goods had turned up from the northern hemisphere, so he drove up to Wellington to collect them from his old university mate Chris Wilkie, who had recently returned from London with his young family.
Chris, who describes himself as a “serial entrepreneur”, was also looking for a new project. A day after they met up and Tim shared his business plan, Chris was in, along with another university friend and designer, Sam Flaherty. Otis Oat Milk was born.
“We didn’t ponder anything; we didn’t muck around, we just dived right in,” Chris says. “The timing couldn’t have been better.”
“Wilkie, Sam and I work seamlessly together,” Tim says. “We partnered quickly with Foodsouth (the South Island hub of the New Zealand Food Innovation Network), and they challenged us a lot on the realities of setting something like this up because I think they get a lot of dreamers.”
At home, oat-milk production usually involves soaking oats in water, then squeezing out the resulting liquid through fine muslin. That’s impractical on a commercial scale, says