Firm finds recipe for growth in cut salads

By ELLEN READ

A desire to provide something healthy for their family led Vicky Thompson and Mark Goodwin to buy a food business and develop it to the point that it is now thriving.

The couple, who are passionate about healthy, beautiful cut salads, vegetable mixes and sprouts, bought Living Foods in 1993.

They paid $35,000 for a business with annual sales then of $100,000.

Their aim now is to break the $10 million annual sales figure in two years.

Living Foods, always an innovator, began to revolutionise the local cut salad industry at a time when only iceberg lettuce and a couple of fancy lettuces were available in New Zealand.

The company started importing mesclun, a mix of salad greens, from Australia, at first just for top hotel chefs and then later for the public.

Initial orders of a few boxes of mesclun each week have grown to more than 4 tonnes, especially after Living Foods packaged the mesclun into bowls and offered it through selected supermarkets.

In 1998, the company began growing its own mesclun.

"We'd been trying for several years to find a supplier that could consistently give us beautiful, fresh mesclun but we just couldn't do it," said Ms Thompson.

"We had taken centre-stage in promoting and maintaining high-quality cut salads but we couldn't source consistent quality and it was making us crazy."

Setting up the 24ha Mangere farm required a big investment, "but it has been a huge success".

"We're now a leader in fresh cut salad mixes, vegetable mixes and sprouts in the North Island," Ms Thompson said.

Living Foods now employs 50 staff at the farm.

And it is still growing - in both senses. Living Foods' latest venture is broccosprouts.

At 3 1/2 days old, the sprouts - grown from imported seed using just light and water - contain at least 20 times the level of the natural indirect antioxidant sulforaphane GS (SGS) as adult broccoli.

This means a single 28g serving of broccosprouts provides as much SGS as eating more than half a kilo of mature, cooked broccoli.

Living Foods is one of fewer than two dozen growers worldwide chosen to grow broccosprouts under licence from Brassica Protection Products, a company founded by researchers at one of the United States' leading research universities, Johns Hopkins in Baltimore.

The university has maintained part-ownership in Brassica and the company's chief executive, Tony Talalay, was in New Zealand last month to help Living Foods launch the product.

Broccosprouts were introduced in the US two years ago to huge success, and since New Zealanders eat far more sprouts per capita than Americans, Ms Thompson says Living Foods is expecting big sales.

"We're innovators and we've always believed in growing healthy foods because we know they are good for people," she said.

And with a family of four children, she and Mr Goodwin believe that healthy and easy food is a must, especially at this time of year, when the company is a seven-day enterprise.