Never heard of mānuka oil? Joanna Wane looks at a new liquid gold rush that could transform the East Cape.
At the northern tip of the East Cape, where the first Polynesian waka landed 1000 years ago, the highway sweeps away from the coast and crosses the Whangaparāoa River. Give it two or three years, reckons iwi leader Allen Waenga, and the view from the bridge will stop people in their tracks.
“That’s mānuka, they’ll say. These fellas are mad, they’re growing the stuff!” he tells me, his feet firmly grounded on the 18-hectare property where rows of bushy mānuka trees are transforming the whenua. “Look at it — it’s already incredible.” Then he laughs. “Our ancestors and forefathers spent all of their lives cutting it down, so a few of them will be rolling around in their graves ...”
These paddocks where cattle once grazed and beehives hummed are part of a network of mānuka plantations spread across the East Cape. Since the first commercial block was trialled in 2015, the operation has expanded to cover 130ha and number more than five million trees. What’s being harvested isn’t honey (or firewood) but a different kind of liquid gold.
In partnership with the local Te Whānau-ā-Apanui iwi — who are also shareholders in the company — Manuka Bioscience is now the largest producer of mānuka oil in the world. While it’s still a fledgling industry, the Kiwi botanical science company has big ambitions. “Remember when Marlborough used to be all farmland?” says co-founder Stuart Cairns. “Now there are grapes everywhere. You could see that on the East Cape with mānuka.”
Mānuka honey may have stolen all the limelight so far but mānuka oil, which is extracted from the trees’ foliage through a steam-distillation process, has been the subject of international scientific research over the past 50 years. So its potential for treating bacterial, fungal and viral infections is already well-established; it’s also good for your skin. The problem, until now, has been the lack of a consistent supply, with the oil largely harvested from trees growing in the wild, where mānuka is considered a weed.
No one knows exactly why but the level of beta-triketones — natural compounds that give the oil its remarkable therapeutic properties — is significantly higher in East Cape mānuka than anywhere else in the world, including the rest of New Zealand. A nationwide survey found levels exceeding 20 per cent across the East Cape. In Ōpōtiki, about 100km east of Waenga’s plantation, that drops to 2 per cent, although there’s another spike in the Marlborough Sounds. Australian mānuka has no triketones at all.
Analysis at the Cawthron Institute found East Cape mānuka oil is 30 times more powerful against bacteria than tea tree oil and 1000 times more powerful than mānuka honey. A ManukaRx skincare range is already on the market and an anti-bacterial 3K+ gel produced by the company is being used as a pre-procedure preparation in Australian laser skin clinics.
This year, clinical trials are being held to test new treatments for eczema in both adults and children, using the oil as an active ingredient, and also for impetigo (a nasty skin infection commonly known as school sores). It may even have a role to play in combatting antibiotic resistance, considered by the World Health Organisation to be one of the greatest threats to global health. A UK study found East Cape mānuka oil was “highly effective” against the MRSA superbug, an antibiotic-resistant staph bacteria that causes serious skin and wound infections.
There’s still a long way to go before mānuka oil becomes the next kiwifruit or Marlborough sauvignon blanc, but that kind of premium cash crop could provide a much-needed boost to the East Cape economy.
Waenga, who’s chairman of the Potikirua land block trust, is answerable to both its 300 owners and 3000 beneficiaries. He admits it was a leap of faith to convince them to invest in the mānuka plantation, which the trust manages independently and funded by on-selling cutting rights to a stand of pine trees. “It took a lot of courage,” he says. “I don’t know the terminology. We call it balls.”
The East Cape’s isolation is one of its treasures, says Waenga, but also its Achilles’ heel. His father’s whakapapa traces back to those first waka that made landfall at Whangaparāoa/Cape Runaway. Now, with six children of his own, it’s the next migration that Waenga worries — the rangitahi who leave because they don’t see a future for themselves on the coast.
“We’ve really committed ourselves to giving this a good crack. I think it’s going to be the making of an industry, because our land here is just designed for it,” he says. “To create opportunities for people, you’ve got to try something, right?
“Everyone talks about the money return, but we don’t look at it that way down here. For every person who gets a job on a plantation like this one, you’re making a difference in their life, in their family’s life. We look at those outgoings as a profit, not a loss. It keeps the schools going. It keeps the local shops producing tucker if you want to go for a kai. All I want to do is make it work for the people.”
Extracting the oil is something new, but Māori traditionally used mānuka leaves, branches, flowers and bark to treat everything from acne to wounds and skin infections. Waenga thinks indigenous medicinal health products are one of the most untapped resources in Aotearoa. And planting natives, he says, is good for the soul.
“The government has failed to help us economically down here. It would have been easy to just keep running cattle and not contribute to helping the region grow. We have to look at alternative uses of the land on the coast to create new opportunities and this is obviously fantastic for the environment because there’s no leaching of nitrates.”
A rugged 4WD track off the main road cuts through the bush for 14km before dropping down to the old river flats at Maungaroa Station, near Te Kaha. It’s a dramatic way to enter the 100-hectare property, with sweeping views of what was one of the district’s last sheep stations before being converted to mānuka.
This is the company’s East Cape HQ, a huge oil-production site and outdoor experimental lab where new ideas are put to the test. With no other template to work from, Australian tea tree oil plantations have been used as the model for mānuka, but that’s already evolving. Selected blocks are now being made over with much wider spacing between rows to let in more sunlight, sacrificing the number of trees for the promise of denser foliage and a higher yield. (Pretty as it is, the mānuka flower doesn’t contain any oil.)
Between harvests, the trees are left to regrow, but the industry is still so green that their productive lifespan is yet to be determined. Finding the right equipment has been another challenge, complicated by the Covid-19 pandemic affecting supply. An organic section is being trialled for official certification, but the use of systemic chemicals has already been dropped right across the station in favour of spot-spraying with a heavily diluted formula.
Hein Wait, an expat South African, is field operations manager for Mānuka Biologicals, the arm of the company that handles oil production and bulk oil sales. He believes new genetic lines could boost triketone levels to beyond 30 per cent and extraction rates to 6-8kg of oil per tonne, compared to the 2-2.5kg they’re getting today.
“It’s a work in progress, but we’re continually looking for that super-plant,” he says, acknowledging the effort that’s also gone into converting sceptical locals who see mānuka as nothing more than scrub. “For years, they’ve been trying to eradicate it. ‘Come on, man, it’s planted weeds!’ But we’re all pioneers here.”
Foliage is processed by what’s essentially a big boil-up on site to distil the oil then remove the water content, creating a hydrosol byproduct that could be commercialised further down the line. The huge mounds of debris left over after the extraction process are put back on the land as nutrient-rich mulch. A custom-made app digitally tracks production across all the plantations and the provenance of each batch of oil, right down to the specific block.
Wait is frequently on-site, working alongside the crew. On their time off, permission to hunt deer or pigs on the land is a perk of the job. The company, which manages a number of its partner iwi plantations, has a policy of only hiring locals, upskilling them through hands-on experience. “It’s generational, so they can pass the knowledge onto their kids,” he says. “Dad’s not just a labourer; he’s a skilled excavator or boiler operator. They get a sense of worth on their own land.”
It takes Manaia Walker-Nyman about 45 minutes to drive to work at Maungaroa Station from his parents’ place in Whanarua Bay but at least it’s in a company car; access to a sturdy 4WD vehicle that can handle the terrain comes with the territory. He helped prep some of the first paddocks for planting when he started here in 2016; now one of the senior hands, he’s about to complete his boiler certification.
This year, he’s aiming for police training college and credits his time on the plantation with giving him the confidence to apply, although he won’t be leaving the East Cape behind him. “I’m glued to this place,” he says. “And being out here, it’s free. In town, I feel like I’m smothered all the time.”
The 25-year-old reckons a lot of young people would stay if there was a more promising future on offer. After leaving school, he went shearing in Taumarunui for a while. The mahi was hard, but the money was good. “Forestry is too dangerous for me — I’ve had cousins pass away in forestry. A lot of people get into kiwifruit because that’s what their parents do. It’s all they know. But that’s just surviving. Being here, on one of the first plantations in the world to do mānuka, that’s a buzz. I’ve learnt heaps.”
Manuka Bioscience buys some of its raw oil from one of two other independent East Cape producers, which operate on a much smaller scale. At the moment, most of the supply is on-sold to the essential oil and skin care industries, with 70 per cent going offshore. However, the company’s R&D labs are developing new formulas, with a view to licensing botanical ingredients to pharmaceutical companies for over-the-counter products and dermatological therapeutics that use East Cape mānuka oil as the core active ingredient. One thing it won’t be used for is perfume; mānuka’s strong herbal smell is not to everyone’s taste.
For now, the international market is watching with interest until results are reported from the clinical trials. The mood is bullish at Manuka Bioscience, which recently promoted a private investment offer to raise equity. The minimum target of $2.5 million was exceeded before the offer closed on Tuesday.
Wayne Campbell, the science and technical manager at the Mānuka Botanicals base in Ōpōtiki, says working with the oil isn’t easy, with each batch taking 2-3 months to process. On the plus side, it’s non-allergenic and has a long shelf life if kept in correct conditions. He’s looking at ways to standardise quality by extracting pure triketones from the oil, which will be given a grading system in a similar way to mānuka honey.
Campbell predicts we’ll soon be seeing the greater use of natural products in the cosmetic and pharmaceutical sectors, using blends of essential oils or other plant extracts to develop formulas that target specific organisms. “I’m interested in any natural product that has an efficacy that’s proven,” he says. “There’s a whole unexplored field around that at the moment. If you take mānuka oil plus tea tree oil, 1 +1 might equal 5 and that’s when you get that really big synergistic effect. It’s a matter of getting the right combinations.”