Lamb chips for the Falkland Islands

By PHILIPPA STEVENSON

An agribusiness company launching an export drive has found a way to cash in on New Zealanders who have moved overseas.

Hamilton-based frozen meat chip maker Aria Farm is making the most of Kiwi connections in Australia and the Falkland Islands to shift from the domestic to the export market.

Former King Country farming couple Erik and Anna Arndt started the company three years ago to add value to their farming operation.

It has since blossomed into a standalone food-processing operation, and they intend to export both its products and the technology that creates them.

The lamb and beef chips were developed with help from AgResearch and the Meat Industry Research Institute - and by much trial and error in the couple's home kitchen. They have been sold in New Zealand since February last year.

Seventeen supermarkets initially stocked the frozen chips, which are partly designed as a quick and nutritious snack for children.

They now feature in the freezer cabinets of 360 stores nationwide, and in May a chicken chip was added to the range.

"Our aim is to be the most innovative food processor on the Pacific Rim," said Mr Arndt, who is also developing a vegetable chip.

The business sells about four tonnes of chips a week, or 8000 of the 500g bags at $5 each.

Its growth is forcing it out of a Ruakura abattoir into dedicated premises, where production will expand from three days a week to five and output lift by a further tonne a day.

The couple, who won a TVNZ-Marketing Magazine marketing award in August, this month received an $8300 enterprise award from Deputy Prime Minister Jim Anderton.

The money, tagged for legal, accounting and consulting fees, was presented just days before they headed to Australia to check the market there.

Working with expatriate New Zealander Don Hill, whose food broking firm, Tasman Link Fine Foods, imports and sells a range of products, the couple calculate that the Australian market could take about six times the New Zealand market, or 24 tonnes a week.

They aim to increase processing of the beef and lamb chips to a level where they can serve both markets by February. Australia does not allow chicken imports.

Mrs Arndt said they intended a two-pronged approach to exporting.

They would export their technology by setting up processing facilities in countries such as Australia, which had an ample supply of the raw ingredients, and sell the actual products in markets such as Asia, where they expected strong demand for chips suitable for stir fry cooking.

It is the chip-processing technology which interests Falkland Island-based New Zealander Colin Horton, who is managing director of Falklands Landholdings, the island's equivalent of Landcorp.

The former Ministry of Agriculture farm consultant said the Falklands' outdated abattoir was being replaced by a European Union-approved facility, which would eventually kill around 50,000 lambs and 50,000 sheep a year from the national flock of about one million.

The island's 2500-strong British military contingent had contracted to take roasts and strip loins, but that left the problem of what to do with the rest of the carcass, said Mr Horton.

When he came across Aria Farm chips at this year's Mystery Creek National Agricultural Fieldays, he believed he had found a solution to the problem as well as unearthed another industry for the 2500 resident islanders.

Progress will depend on the abattoir reaching a killing capacity to warrant chip manufacture, but Aria Farm may have a Falkland Island outpost from 2002.