By PHILIPPA STEVENSON
Picking what makes Lynn Garrett more of a rarity is not easy - her manufacturing and marketing of processed meat products into export niches, or her survival for 20 years in a rugged industry?
She is also probably one of the few people who can be accurately described as
having singlehandedly built a business.
Mrs Garrett acknowledges that she has a large network of people she calls on for their skill and advice.
But it is clear that the true nerve-centre of the small Garrett International Meats factory, begun in 1989 in a corner of Penrose's old Southdown works, is in Mrs Garrett's head.
It is a busy place.
As she says, "I've created a monster."
If a real creature, the "monster" would probably look like a giant deepsea squid - seldom seen around New Zealand, very valuable and with tiny tentacles emerging in the most unlikely places around the globe.
This week, for instance, Mrs Garrett will send a few cartons of cooked beef to France, where a ravioli maker will test it in small pasta packets.
The manufacturers sought New Zealand beef because it is free of the mad cow disease that is causing a health scare in France, and because they wanted a ready-to-use meat product.
Mrs Garrett is also awaiting feedback on a trial of meat used last weekend in hundreds of airline passenger meals by caterers whom she supplied in Samoa and Singapore.
The reformed venison, lamb and beef was semi-cooked before being added to the travellers' meal trays. The cooking was finished in the carts on the planes.
Those are just two examples of the products Mrs Garrett cooks up regularly.
She experiments with new meat products at the factory, and invites her 13 staff to be similarly creative.
"You make it, I'll sell it," she tells them.
She also takes work home and "plays around" with meat on her stove, often in the company of her mother, who lives with Mrs Garrett, husband Ken and 14-year-old daughter Ashley.
In a multibillion-dollar industry that has barely escaped from total dependence on the frozen carcass trade, Garrett International's product range reflects its owner's innovation and commitment to adding value to New Zealand meat.
For more than a decade the call has gone out for companies to further process meat, creating more valuable products, industries and jobs.
Few have answered the call the way Mrs Garrett has.
For most companies, adding value has meant switching emphasis from exporting hundreds of thousands of tonnes of whole, frozen carcasses to cutting meat into a standard range of cuts, some still exported frozen but increasingly as more valuable chilled meat.
Garrett International's product list looks more like the menu of a gourmet's dream restaurant. The traditional roasts, steaks and cuts are there - trimmed finer than the industry standard - but so is lamb stroganoff and meatballs, marinated, smoked, cooked and seasoned lamb cuts, venison salami, kebabs and noisettes, beef pastrami, jerky and rib fingers, and sausages to please the palate of people of any ethnicity - Italian, Mexican, Moroccan - or with a desire for any mixture of herbs and spices - curry and chilli, pineapple and sage, sundried tomato and basil.
And at the halal-certified factory, nothing goes to waste. Even the bones are cut, cleaned and sold to carvers.
Apart from members of the Islamic community seeking guaranteed halal-slaughtered meat, and a few discerning locals who have tracked down the factory after trying Garrett meat overseas, the brand with the green fernleaf is unknown in New Zealand - unless you pick up a passenger pack of meat cuts at an airport.
Mrs Garrett does not believe most New Zealanders are prepared to pay the greater cost of the quality of meat she produces. So she sticks to export markets where people are willing to pay.
The company's annual turnover of $3.5 million puts it among the country's smallest operators by magnitude.
But, says Meat Industry Association executive director Brian Lynch, "for innovation and creativity it warrants a much higher ranking."
He says Mrs Garrett's 20 years in the industry, beginning as a 16-year-old in the stock office of R&W Hellaby, means she is very experienced, "and a survivor."
"She's been a mentor to many, not that too many would admit it in this male-dominated industry."
Mrs Garrett is strong-minded and not averse to rattling cages, he says.
"But when she speaks her mind she always has something to say.
"You need people with the tenacity of hot-blooded terriers; who are willing to question and not take what the bureaucrats say for granted."
Despite having raised others' hackles, the high regard in which she is held is shown by her appointment to the Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry's verification agency advisory board.
"She gives of herself," says Mr Lynch, a statement with which Peter Kerr, executive officer of the Sheep Research Foundation, agrees.
He phoned Mrs Garrett a few years ago to congratulate her on winning an export award. He has maintained contact, calling especially when disappointed with the meat industry.
"Twenty minutes talking to her is inspirational," he says.
"Because she is a woman, she has a wider perspective, looking at meat from a food point of view, rather than the 'flogging off a commodity' point of view."
He relates the tale of when, a few years ago, a frustrated Mrs Garrett decided to close her business.
"She had two weeks of clients calling her telling her not to quit. This is the person selling the most expensive meat products in New Zealand."
And if high prices do not put customers off, neither do the tough tactics of a woman who says she is known as "the Iron Lady" and describes herself as a true trader.
Garrett International has about a quarter of the Pacific market for restaurants, hotels, caterers and, as she put it, "supplying the masses."
But she tells customers: "You want my steak, you take my chips."
Garrett International annually exports 150 tonnes of processed potato chips to Pacific island markets.
If she has dreamed up a new product, Mrs Garrett will tell customers that they can have their regular order but they must take - and pay for - a carton of the new product.
Often the innovation proves a hit and is added to the order, she says.
As well as meat, her trading takes in scallops, oysters, salmon and butter, plus toilet paper, photocopy paper and once a container of charcoal to the United States, because New Zealand charcoal cooked the steaks she had sold better than American charcoal.
For about four years, Mrs Garrett has worked with farmer Mark Holdaway, who finishes large East Friesian lambs on specially sown, high-protein pasture on his Albany farm.
The success of the product has prompted her to focus on Merino sheep, too, which she hopes to sell into the Middle East.
But 12 years in a rollercoaster business - the highs of success interspersed by lows wrought by insufficient capital, the knockbacks of joint ventures that never lived up to their promise, disastrous deals and undercutting competitors - raise a few questions about Garrett International.
How has a one-woman operation survived and been successful in an undeniably brutal business?
More importantly, given its success against the odds, why is Garrett International still such a rare type of business within the giant industry?
Mrs Garrett has her theories. Meat companies, she says, do little new-product research, relying still on the traditional, commodity-type, fresh product - and the markets are used to it.
"The world's not used to New Zealand supplying anything other than what it does supply," she says.
Lack of trust plagues the industry, from farmer through to processor and marketer.
Morale in the processing industry is low after years of staff layoffs, which have also robbed the sector of experience and institutional knowledge, she says.
Her own staff are mature butchers and boners.
And exporting her style of products is a mind-numbingly bureaucratic process.
Because country-to-country import protocols have been negotiated mostly with New Zealand's fresh meat exports in mind, new protocols must be established for virtually every new processed product.
The detail required clearly puts off all but the most determined.
Mrs Garrett believes it is to her advantage that she is female and a cook, but she has seen no sign that the industry values those attributes enough to encourage women into the business.
Meat exporter is a cut above the rest
By PHILIPPA STEVENSON
Picking what makes Lynn Garrett more of a rarity is not easy - her manufacturing and marketing of processed meat products into export niches, or her survival for 20 years in a rugged industry?
She is also probably one of the few people who can be accurately described as
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