Eloise and Andrew Helms with their daughter Bonnie. Photo / David Haxton
Nestled between two coffee shops in Sheffield St, Paraparaumu, is a small caravan, with the aroma of sweet treats wafting from it.
It’s a small family-owned food truck, specialising in Dutch desserts.
Eloise Helms started Montfoort about a decade ago due to her love for Dutch food.
Her father, Gerard, made the move to New Zealand from Montfoort, Netherlands, in his early 20s, largely due to poverty in Europe that made jobs harder to get.
Eloise grew up on Dutch food, and after working in hospitality since her teenage years she wanted a change, so she decided to start a Dutch food business, which she called Montfoort.
“I luckily had a job that allowed me to just drop a day to do this.”
Gradually, she started focusing more on growing her business, and about 10 years ago she took the leap and started doing it fulltime.
When the business first got started, Eloise and her husband Andrew, who lived in Wellington, were exclusively selling their desserts at the Chaffers Dock Market, but after relocating to Kāpiti they wanted a spot to base their business.
That’s when they found the vacant spot in Sheffield St and when the Dark Horse roastery was built next door, the area got a lot busier.
Now they’re open in Paraparaumu every Friday and Saturday from 9am to 12pm, and they attend the Harbourside Market every Sunday.
Eloise said they have a “really good following” at the Harbourside Market, but she wants to grow her Kāpiti customer base.
“We’re just trying to build that up here and gain a Kāpiti following too.”
She bought a rundown Anglo caravan off Trade Me to turn the business into a food truck and convinced her father to gut it and do it up for her – which he managed to complete in under six months.
“My dad probably didn’t agree to doing the entire project, he probably said ‘I’ll do the flooring and the walls and someone else can do the rest’, but he got roped into doing everything.
“Before [the caravan] we were in a marquee, so we were very grateful.”
Eloise originally learned how to make poffertjes (Dutch pancakes) from her Dutch aunty Greet, but adapted the recipe for a larger quantity, and taught herself to make stroopwafels (Dutch biscuits with a chewy caramel centre). While she only sells the poffertjes to order in the caravan, the stroopwafels are sold both wholesale and made to order.
The poffertjes come with your choice of topping - banana butter, salted caramel, lemon curd, or chocolate fudge and the stroopwafels are one flavour.
And during the cold winter months, a third item is added to the menu – oliebollen (fruit-filled Dutch donuts).
Eloise doesn’t see her menu changing too much either, and said over the years she has narrowed it down to just those three items to avoid “spreading herself too thin”.
And running a food truck also comes with its fair share of challenges.
For Eloise, the weather is the biggest one.
When it rains, fewer people visit the food truck in Paraparaumu, and the market isn’t as busy when the weather is bad.
There’s also an endless supply of new things to learn, and Eloise said, “You don’t always know exactly what you’re doing, but you learn.
“Over time I’ve learned to work with those challenges.”
But despite those challenges, she said the best part of running the food truck is the customers.
Eloise’s favourite part of her job is customer interaction, and seeing the customers enjoying her food, and she finds that despite people being sceptical of foreign foods, most people are convinced when she tells them how simple the recipes are.
“People are surprisingly willing to try things they haven’t seen before.”
She really struggled during the Covid lockdown, because she missed running the store and seeing people.
She’s also got a lot of regular customers, some of whom have been visiting her food truck for 14 years and whose “kids have grown up eating our poffertjes”.
And Montfoort gets a lot of Dutch customers too, most of whom Eloise said are “second generation, who have grown up with an oma (grandmother) and opa (grandfather) that have passed away, and no one in the family is making the food anymore”.
“They really come out of the woodwork when there’s Dutch food around.”
- This story appears in the latest Celebrating Kāpiti spring/summer edition