Alice Shopland always felt uncomfortable eating animals. That nagging doubt has resulted in a new Kiwi alternative foods business considering a launch in Australia.
Shopland's company, Angel Food, is a non-dairy cheese producer which supplies New Zealand supermarkets. She says the back story of her company is a sign of the times; a signal that the world is changing.
As climate change and an ailing planet demand change in human habits, more people are buying electric vehicles, more are rejecting plastics and still more are changing the way they eat. Shopland says her possible move into Australia – she has engaged Yellow, the multi-channel marketing agency, to help raise her company's profile – comes after the rise of two new trends in eating: flexitarianism and reducetarianism.
She believes the rise of flexitarians (people who eat mainly a plant-based diet but include meat and other animal products in moderation) and reducetarians (those opting for an occasional vegetarian meal) means the time is right to look at growing her business.
The number of Kiwis eating plant-based meals has doubled in the last three years. Research by Kantar, part of its Better Futures 2022 report, has revealed the percentage of flexitarian Kiwis has jumped from 10 per cent in 2018 to 19 per cent in 2021.
More New Zealanders are also adopting a vegan lifestyle and diet (no animal-derived products). A recent survey by Rabobank and KiwiHarvest, a company that re-distributes waste food, revealed that five per cent of Kiwis identify as vegan and nine per cent as vegetarian.
Shopland believes reducetarians are probably an even bigger group: "These are people who reduce the amount of meat or animal-derived foods by, for example, eating a vegetarian meal for lunch or having oat milk in their coffee instead of dairy milk.
"I believe 1000 people significantly reducing their animal-derived foods will have more impact on the environment than 10 people adopting a fully vegan diet."
Shopland says her decision to go vegan "just fell into place", leading to the birth of Angel Food. Her doubts about consuming animals came in adulthood but she also had an early start in alternative eating.
"When I was growing up, our family ate a lot of cheese," she says. "We were never a meat-and-three-veg family. My mum Sylvia grew up in England but her mum was French and she also lived in Malaysia for 18 months – and they had vegetarian Quaker relatives stay with them during the war. Mum loved experimenting with different ingredients - we used to eat things like tofu and chick peas before most Kiwis had even heard of them."
Shopland adopted a vegan lifestyle after meeting a vegan. "I just stopped eating animal products. I love animals and had felt uncomfortable eating that way – and when I no longer did so, it felt like a big weight off my shoulders.
"I started distributing dairyfree cheese because I wanted to make it easy for others who wanted to be vegan, or close to it. I chose cheese because it is a comfort food, people don't like living without it."
So Angel Food came about through a passionate concern for the impact food production has on animals and, since then, the environmental impact has also become increasingly important to her.
Angel Food began in 2006, importing vegan cheese from the United Kingdom. By 2014, Shopland was producing her own cheese, launching a dairy-free mozzarella that year.
Today Angel Food produces an average of 10 tonnes of cheese every month and distributes six different types of non-dairy products. All are supplied to supermarkets, other grocery stockists throughout the country and customers like Pizza Hut and the Cheesecake Shop.
With plans to launch two more early next year and the possible expansion into Australia, Shopland has taken on Yellow to help raise awareness of the Angel Foods brand and maintain the momentum the business is enjoying.
The two new non-dairy products - feta cheese and sour cream - will add to the company's current product range of plant-based cheese products: cheddar, mozzarella, cream cheese, powdered parmesan, smoked cheddar and grated cheese. Shopland, working alongside a technical product developer, also creates the recipes for the product range, all made in New Zealand.
Shopland is pleased with results she is getting from the partnership with Yellow. An average of 1200 new users have gone to the Angel Food website every month (at a cost of less than a $1 per click via Google and Facebook ads) as a result, while the number of followers on Facebook and Instagram is up 100 per cent compared to the three months immediately prior to the start of the campaign.
"When we were considering going with Yellow, I met the team," Shopland says. "They seemed like good people to work with, understood what we needed and cared about our success. They do all our Google, Facebook and Instagram ads and are now working on developing topics for blog posts and a social media content calendar."
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