The Chronicle Q&A: Waverley’s Marianne Archibald talks lettuce, plans and hobbies

The Salad Brothers team (from left) Kristine Bell, Marianne Archibald, Chris Carrick and Garth Archibald.

Alyssa Smith caught up with Marianne Archibald from Waverley’s Salad Brothers to talk about the business, lettuce, future plans and more.

Tell me a bit about your business – who are the people behind Salad Brothers? It’s me, my husband Chris Carrick, my brother Garth Archibald and then his wife Kristine Bell. Starting Salad Brothers wasn’t expected. It was a surprise life twist for us. We’ve been selling our own lettuce for about a year and, as we’re still learning, there are some times we bungle it up – like we ran out of lettuce leaves once and our seeds didn’t germinate and so on. However, we’re now fully brimming and our customers are excited we’re back. They love our product.

Why the name Salad Brothers? Because Garth and my husband are brother-in-laws. It’s got the nice alliteration, it’s good. Who knows, maybe in the future we’ll come up with something and call it Salad Sisters.

How do you like living in Waverley? We love it. My brother, his wife and I are originally from Auckland so being here is so nice and relaxing. There are no traffic jams, although there may be some sheep or tractors on the road. We get a lot of support from the community here and in Taranaki and Whanganui.

When you all have free time, what do you do? We’re all quite different in what we do. My husband is a keen fisherman, hunter and tramper. He’s going to walk the length of New Zealand soon. My brother is a surfer and my sister-in-law is a keen gardener. As for me, I just started my own life coach business. I believe people can be whatever they want to be and I can help them achieve that.

So let’s talk lettuce – what do you grow and what do you think the best lettuce is for a burger? We grow six types of lettuce and in that there are a variety of the six different types. Now the best type of lettuce? That’s a hard one. We grow a nice green frilly lettuce which is a good all-rounder.

What other types of lettuce do you grow? We have a red spiky lettuce which is just juicy, crunchy and good. It doesn’t get stuck in your throat – you know how sometimes you eat leafy things and they get stuck? Our lettuces don’t do that. We also have an oak which is a buttercrunch that’s quite nice. We have one that we call the Willy Wonka – it’s spicy and green and has that nice and juicy crunch as well. I think the coolest one is a red lettuce which changes colour depending on the environment. It could be a ruby red and then change to a deep purple.

What have you been working on currently? On Friday we hosted a dinner party for our newly finished tunnel house. So at the moment, we’re just getting our systems in place and planning. When you grow lettuce, how much you plant depends on the season. In summer, you plant less as it grows so quickly but in winter, it takes longer so you plant everything out. At the dinner party, Chris’ mum Marie Carrick cut the ribbon with South Taranaki District Mayor Phil Nixon, which was quite cool.

So the new tunnel house – how big is it? It’s 900 square metres, 6.5 metres high and 60 metres long – which will home 16,000 lettuces plus 9000 lettuces. The business grows 60,000 lettuces a year at a time, with about eight rotations a year.

How do you prepare the lettuce for sale? Everything we do is by hand. We hand-pick the lettuce, hand-wash it and then it goes for a spin in the washing machine before it’s bagged by hand. Our customers can be certain the lettuce is clean and well prepared because it’s humans behind all the processes, not machines.