Reuben Alderson’s journey from graphic design to artisan food success

Reuben Alderson (left), founder of Alderson's, and business partner Tom Moore have grown the artisan food brand well beyond its humble beginnings.

Reuben Alderson, founder of Alderson’s, talks to Tom Raynel about switching from graphic design to artisan foods and how playing to his strengths has helped grow the business. Each Monday, we interview a small business owner, which is now a regular feature of NZME’s editorial campaign On The Up, showcasing uplifting stories of success, inspiration and possibilities.

What is Alderson’s?

Alderson’s a down-to-earth, small Kiwi family business. We started with hot sauces years ago and we’ve maintained them, but pickles has really been where it’s taken off. We’ve got quite a lot of new business in retail and in food service, like hospitality.

We’ve always tried to keep things locally grown and locally made. If you’ve seen our packaging, our sauces have a twist on Mexican flavours, but with a Kiwi slant.

What inspired you to start the business?

I did a lot of travelling in Latin America earlier in life with my parents, and I did a big OE-type thing there, so I’ve been exposed to their culture and their food. The passion in the beginning was with chillies, and then that moved to pickles.

I started off as a graphic designer, so I’d been doing that for about 10 years, and I developed a few of the hot sauces and was selling them in markets and whatnot, and built from there.

Alderson's has had to import gherkin seeds to New Zealand and sign a contract with an official grower to accommodate the crop needed for its products.

How did you fund the business, and do you run it all yourself?

Until about two years ago it was all me, but now we have got a few more partners. With that there’s been a bit of investment, and so we’ve really expanded quite significantly over the last two years, which has been really cool.

My business partner, Tom Moore, he was also his own start-up and we’ve joined forces. He does the selling of the products and I do the making. It’s a really good synergy, and we both have different skill sets which work really well.

We had known each other a little bit from various food shows and whatnot. Tom could see that there was a market for locally produced pickles, specifically for food service and restaurants, because no one was doing it. I had the skills to make the stuff, and also the growers. So at that point we thought we’ll join forces and see what we can do, and it’s worked well since then.

As you say, the business has expanded recently?

It’s gone from a very small at-home operation to much bigger. I had a reasonably decent commercial kitchen on my property, and we used contractors as well for certain products. We’ve taken that and we’ve built our own factory where we can do almost everything ourselves, and we’ve got a number of fulltime staff. We’ve also invested in equipment so we can really crank out the volume.

Last year for instance, we processed 100 tonnes of pickles from September to February, so that was a pretty decent milestone. Every week we get a truck turning up and there’s anywhere between two and seven massive pallets loaded with gherkins.

There’s been a bit of a challenge with the pickles, as they aren’t readily available in New Zealand, particularly commercially. We’ve had to go through the whole process of finding growers, importing the seeds and getting them to grow it, so it’s been quite a big process. We’re in quite a cool space now where we’ve developed our own crop and we’re producing everything from scratch here locally, which there are a few very small companies doing that.

Alderson's makes several artisan food products, particularly hot sauces and a product that has helped the business rapidly grow: pickles.

What has been the biggest challenge in starting the business?

The challenge is getting the price point right, then you’ve got to have the machinery and the setup and knowledge to be able to produce something efficiently and cost-effectively. We’ve obviously bought new equipment, set up a new space, worked out the workflow for production, and just been trying to tweak things to get more efficiency so that we can deliver something at a decent price point that we can sell to lots of people.

That’s rather than what I was doing four or five years ago where everything was manual and a lot more expensive to make. So that’s been a huge learning curve and a lot of trial and error.

What would be your advice to a budding entrepreneur wanting to start a business?

I’d say if you can team up with someone, more often than not it makes it a lot easier in all manner of ways. Working with someone else who has different skill sets to you is pretty incredible because you can bounce ideas off each other and they can fill in the gaps where you fail.

Tom Raynel is a multimedia business journalist for the Herald, covering small business, retail and tourism.