Cream coals to Newcastle
There was no market research ‘‘on principle’’ before they set about making pricey butter.
When I think of Lewis Road Creamery the sayings ‘‘selling fridges to Eskimos’’ or ‘‘taking coals to Newcastle’’ come to mind. The Auckland-based company has recreated our Kiwi staples of butter, milk, icecream and now bread and is selling them for a premium.
I sat next to Lewis Road founder and director Peter Cullinane at a restaurant a few years ago watching him spread lashings of butter on his food.
At the time it wasn’t cool to like anything fatty, least of all show public displays of affection for it.
Fat was considered bad, dairy was unhealthy and bread was acceptable only if you took the grain out. It was a slither of butter on a Time magazine cover with the words ‘‘It’s Back’’ that marked the serendipitous moment when Cullinane knew he could go commercial with his love of real butter.
But hang on. New Zealand does butter – lots of it – and icecream and bread. And it’s pretty difficult to make an impure butter here – by regulation you can’t.
So when the man with the idea has little background in food, but an extremely successful advertising career convincing people to buy stuff, you have to be slightly cynical.
Cullinane says the Kiwi belief that we make the best dairy products is wrong.
The Lewis Road website says it doesn’t consider price or volume; it simply asks, ‘‘How can we make it as it should be?’’ That message has got through: Friends who stump up the money to buy Lewis Road products associate the brand with words such as organic, unadulterated, free range, handmade and preservative free.
Lewis Road’s butter may be pure, but purest marketers would raise an eyebrow. There was no market research ‘‘on principle’’ before they set about making pricey butter.
Add the fact that we were all avoiding fatty foods and you’ve got a product that is out of vogue. Then make it hugely expensive comparatively without any idea what your potential customer base thinks. Risky?
But Cullinane is a man not short on confidence or connections. He backed himself, skipped over the artisan market and marched straight into supplying supermarkets with a goal of 20 per cent share of butter sales in these stores.
That, he claims is what sets Lewis Road aside from so many other pure, premium products in New Zealand. Those connections got him lined up with Whittaker’s to make chocolate milk and then Pandoro owner and McDonald’s bread rolls supplier Malcolm North, who is now producing Lewis Road bread.
If it’s working as well as the ad man says it is, it’s a good model for more premium food producers to consider. Supply enough to get out of the deli and onto the shelves of the mainstream market without compromising on quality, and charge a premium.
And it’s a good model for New Zealand to embrace as an export nation. The conversation that has bounced around for some time is that New Zealand could, and should, be moving away from highvolume, low-cost products and targeting the premium markets overseas.
There is a belief that New Zealand has the potential to develop its brand in the organic, pure, unadulterated, quality end of the export markets. This kind of approach would line up with the ‘‘100% Pure New Zealand’’ tourism brand.
There is a risk, of course, in ensuring we deliver on our promise of high-end products but, as Cullinane says, if the product is not high quality – it should be. That’s really his whole point.