MICHAEL MAYELL

The cookie monster

Everyone is going to get their ‘‘Kodak moment’’, the day tech kills their familiar working world. Watch it come for panelbeaters and car insurers.

Huh? Cookie Time entrepreneur Michael Mayell is clearly still abuzz from the Singularity University event he helped bring to Christchurch last year. Thirteen exponential technology trends which are going to change absolutely everything. Kodak is the famous example of getting caught out. ‘‘From being the third most valuable brand in the world, it was bankrupt three years later because of digital photography,’’ says Mayell. So think through the consequences of something like self-driving electric vehicles. The impact on van and taxi driving jobs is obvious. ‘‘But panelbeaters and car insurers will also be gone because driverless cars won’t have accidents.’’ Mayell says this is why he has a new mantra. ‘‘If your business is not going exponential, then you’re going out of business.’’ And right now, 56-year-old Mayell certainly seems crazy full of new ventures. When we meet, he is in the middle of selling his home office and going virtual with a new business proposition, Nutrient Rescue – your daily fruit and veg requirement delivered as a powdered sachet shot drink.

He also wants to move to Northland, build an eco-commune subdivision using Israeli hot-house technology. Hemp is another big thing. And starting up the ‘‘Uber/Airbnb of home-made takeaways’’ is a plan.

Then there is his ‘‘Drinkable Rivers’’ billboard campaign, which has been confusing the heck out of motorists in 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 multi-million 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 2003. He says it cost a couple of million to develop the underlying engine, so he tried to commercialise that too through another start-up. It was all cutting edge for a brief moment. Then like the Psion, it got swept into oblivion by the exponential pace of technological development. With a resigned shrug, Mayell says if you are not making mistakes as an entrepreneur, you are not learning. New Zealand couldn’t support that kind of pure play technology venture at the time. Rolling forward, 2012 was his actual wake-up call. Mayell suffered a mini-stroke. Too much stress and personal stuff going on, he says – both business and a relationship break-up. ‘‘Basically I was drinking a huge amount of alcohol for a year leading up to it. I was using alcohol as a medicine.’’ Mayell turned vegetarian, then vegan. And he also got caught up in the other half of the Singularity message – the social enterprise idea that business should not just be about dollars, but express a higher purpose.

The argument is that businesses do largely make the world we all live in by the way they operate. So if society is going to make some big needed changes in terms of social justice and environmental 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.

New Zealand’s economy is stuck in a monoculture. ‘‘We have one product – milk powder. And one customer – China.’’

Nutrient Rescue is a line of organic freeze-dried sachets claiming to deliver a daily requirement of fruit and veg – the fibre and micronutrients – in a powdered drink. A $1 green vegetable shot of wheat grass, barley leaf, green pea, broccoli sprout, spearmint and manuka leaf. Or a red fruit shot of boysenberry and blackcurrant. (Tasting notes: The first a bit too much ‘‘minted pea milk shake’’ perhaps, the second a more quaffable berry flavour.)

Mayell says the shots being tea-bag sized packets, a month’s supply can be mailed anywhere direct via on-line marketing. No middleman. And the sales potential is exponential.

‘‘For $3.50, we can use New Zealand Post to deliver plant nutrients to the world. So you’re on the 76th floor of a high rise in Hong Kong, and once a month, organic New Zealand dehydrated fruit and vegetables turn up on your doorstep.’’

Mayell says it fixes the world’s diet while also helping fix New Zealand’s waterways too. ‘‘We could start exporting green powder rather than white powder.’’

Thus the Drinkable Rivers campaign accompanying Nutrient Rescue’s launch. Yes, it gets people talking about his product, he says. But it is also meant to create some truly aspirational environmental goals for Kiwis – ask the question of what the country is in business for? So half-baked or the modern model of change? Time will tell. But Mayell is certainly buzzing. ‘‘We’re going to eat our way to drinkable rivers,’’ he confidently assures.

"We have one product – milk powder. And one customer – China."