Sam Bridgewater started his entrepreneurial journey by selling pine cones from his grandparents’ farm. In a profile for NZME’s On the Up campaign, he reveals how he founded his current business, which he says is on track to turn over $1 billion.
Sam Bridgewater remembers starting his first business when he was only 7.
On his grandparents’ farm on the Kāpiti Coast, he wandered around collecting pine cones, which he would take into Wellington to sell during the winter.
He believes that experience focused him as a youngster and was a part of building his philosophy on life and business.
Bridgewater is the co-founder and co-chief executive of The Pure Food Co, which promotes itself as providing high-quality, nutritious, texture-modified food to seniors in New Zealand, Australia and France.
The business, which he co-founded with school friend Maia Royal, has expanded its reach since 2013 to cover every public hospital in New Zealand and 80% of the country’s aged care facilities.
The pair last year won the services category of the coveted EY Entrepreneur of the Year awards, with the judges describing their business as pioneering work in the textured modified food space.
Australia is now Pure Food’s biggest market with almost 450 aged care and health facilities.
Last month the company announced it had signed a landmark deal with Regis Aged Care, the second-largest aged care provider in Australia. With 67 Regis facilities throughout Australia, The Pure Food Co will serve up to an extra 50,000 meals a month.
For Bridgewater, his path took a similar one to his grandfather, nicknamed “Bumpa”, and a key role model for him when he was growing up.
An obstetrician in Wellington Hospital and in the prime of his career, Bridgewater’s grandfather packed it all up to become a horticultural entrepreneur.
“I could see he had this entrepreneurial side to him that he wasn’t scared to try new things. He wasn’t scared to invest some time, some money, some energy into something that was different or new,” Bridgewater said.
“He was planting tamarillos and kiwifruit and things before people were planting some of these new crops and just not being scared to try something and have it fail.”
Bridgewater’s schooling life was a mix of private and public education. At 11, he went to Huntley Boarding school in the small town of Marton, roughly 30 minutes’ drive from Palmerston North and Whanganui.
He spent two years at Huntley, a place he described as both scary and important, with the school pushing him “really hard” from an academic perspective.
There was also the challenge of living away from home at a young age, but Bridgewater believes that experience made him learn to adapt outside his comfort zone.
“A number of the guys I still see around the traps ... you see them and you’ve created lifelong relationships from living together. Some you haven’t seen them in 30 years, but it’s just like it was yesterday that you saw them.”
Like his brothers, Bridgewater was a keen sportsman. He played cricket and rugby as an openside flanker, often travelling to Whanganui to go up against much-bigger guys.
One aspect of the teaching he received that he wished more schools would adopt was the fostering of entrepreneurship, acknowledging some people are “born with the itch or desire”, but need the encouragement to truly pursue it.
After those two years, Bridgewater finished his schooling at Wellington College where he continued his sporting and academic focus. It’s a place he said he tried to excel at, and worked on becoming a leader. It’s also then that he met his wife and the mother of his children, Harriet.
Following his time at school, Bridgewater took a gap year, heading to Australia where he tended bars. His time there gave him a better understanding of how the “real world” and people operated.
But Bridgewater knew he needed to study, returning to Victoria University to pursue law and finance.
In his penultimate year, Bridgewater landed a year-long internship with Lloyds Bank International in Sydney, part of one of the largest banking groups in Europe.
There he would begin his corporate life, working around the world as an analyst and manager in Auckland, Sydney and London.
Bridgewater credits this time in his life for building on that value proposition aspect he learned early on, adding the crucial element of the personal touch.
“Certainly, in my early days in banking we were really focused on this belief and trying to be a trusted adviser to your customers, really helping them work through the problems that they’ve got. If you’ve got a solution that can help them achieve that value, building that together.”
Despite a career in banking and finance, it was the unfortunate decline of his stepfather’s health that led Bridgewater into aged care.
His stepfather, Mark Pennington, was going through cancer and couldn’t swallow normal food while being treated.
“Watching his journey, I learned a lot about resilience and the power of a positive outlook. He was an incredibly positive guy and he just kept going despite the fact that things were very hard.”
Pennington is an accomplished product designer, working as a director for Formway Furniture for over 20 years. One of his greatest achievements was the design of the Life chair, earning critical acclaim.
His background in design was rooted in designing around human needs and Bridgewater credits crash courses his stepfather gave him for helping guide that focus.
But it was coming back to Pennington’s healthcare experience that resonated with Bridgewater. Seeing the types of food served to patients in that type of care, it was an issue he and Maia Royal couldn’t ignore.
Following in Bumpa’s footsteps, Bridgewater left his career behind to tackle a challenge facing the world, inspired directly by those very experiences he had seen first hand.
Bridgewater and Royal utilised the expertise at the New Zealand Food Innovation Network’s (NZFIN) Food Bowl, a hub for ambitious food and beverage industry innovators.
With no experience in the industry or in food technology, it was the ideal environment for the pair to surround themselves with like-minded innovators who could guide them to success.
Now, over a decade into business, The Pure Food Co is continuing to reach new heights, operating out of its Ōtāhuhu factory, which opened a short time before the initial Covid-19 lockdown in 2020.
Bridgewater said the business was now on track to hit a billion in revenue in the mid-term if it could execute its key strategies and initiatives, particularly around research and development.
The team has grown to 70, made up of a range of food technologists, engineers, dieticians and those on the production line.
That success has been a long time coming. When the business won at the New Zealand Food Awards, the product came in a pouch and was vastly different from the one being distributed.
But since developing their own “Frankenstein-esque” texture-modified food technology to fuel their mission, it earned he and co-founder Maia the EY Entrepreneur of the Year award in the services category last year.
The mission remains at the core of the business for Bridgewater, referring multiple times to the phrase “nourish the world’s seniors”, and for good reason.
Since providing their solution to rest homes throughout the country, they’ve seen a 27% reduction in falls and a 38% decrease in weight loss among the most vulnerable in New Zealand’s aged care eating their meals.
“We don’t prioritise our seniors as much as we should. Maia’s part-Māori and often talks about kaumātua from his perspective, his purpose, and I think that’s right. Western society just doesn’t do it in the way that we should be doing.”
“We’ve got these generations that came before us who in many ways are so much more resilient than us. One of the things that just blew me away was some people had been given these plates of food with a scoop of baked beans on toast on them in the past, and there’s no complaints and people just dealt with it. That’s not the way that it should be, just because that was accepted by some or by many.”
Bridgewater said he’d like to think he’d have made an impact on aged care and the wider sector.
But there’s also a want to inspire the next generation of Kiwis to make their own impact on the rest of the world.
“For the last number of years, I’ve sat on the board of directors of an outfit called Future Food Aotearoa, and it’s really a group of people that are trying to help inspire a community of food tech founders that are trying to build things in New Zealand that can have an impact for the world.”
“In some small way, it can be hard to find oodles of time to do some of these things, but in small ways I’m trying to support other people trying to do similar things. Our mission is to nourish the world’s seniors and there’s so much more work to do.”
His children seem destined to follow in their father’s footsteps and are starting to ask about what business is all about and what it’s like to run one.
Cookie and lemonade stands have already been successfully run on the berm outside their home, and those green shoots are nothing but inspiration for Bridgewater.
“I think kids are going to be more impact led than the generations before them, it’s quite inspiring to see what some of the young guys are coming through with.”
“When I think about my kids, I want to inspire them and give them the opportunity to be anything that they want to be in life. Having a positive impact on their environment and the people around them, I think that’s the most important thing to me.”
Tom Raynel is a multimedia business journalist for the Herald covering small business, retail and tourism.
The centres say changing their primary health organisation will help avoid fee increases.