“It’s a bit like a game of snakes and ladders – sometimes you go two steps forward, only to slide back down again.”
Dick Hubbard is talking about eradicating wilding pines, the exotic trees he’s been at war with for the past few years. A member of the Whakatipu Wilding Control Group (WCG), Hubbard often volunteers with those who spray and chainsaw the Douglas fir trees near his Queenstown home.
“Wilding-pine spread, where the wind blows the pine seeds across the ground, can totally change the landscape, robbing the region of its colourful seasonal leaves and tussock, using up valuable water and increasing fire risk,” he says, grimacing at the introduced species.
“Imagine the iconic face of the Remarkables covered in green forest. Imagine never being able to see the light fall on the tussock-covered slopes of Cecil Peak. That could be the case within the next 30 years. I couldn’t sit back and let those views be denied future generations without doing something to help.”
It’s unusual for the 76-year-old to get into such a lather. Niceness is, after all, intrinsic to the Hubbard brand, particularly the range of breakfast cereals that still bears his name.
The former mayor of Auckland sold the company in 2018, two years after he and wife Diana, 74, moved to Queenstown and threw themselves into philanthropic work, from the WCG to charities such as the First Foundation, which helps students from socially disadvantaged areas attend university.
Outward Bound, with which the couple have both completed courses, is another charity to benefit from their largesse.
Wilding pines aside, Hubbard is in good form, recounting yarn after yarn from his hilltop home, which most days boasts gob-smacking views over Lake Wakatipu and the snow-quilted Remarkables. Today is not that day, with torrential rain obscuring the vista.
But it doesn’t matter because what the couple really want to talk about is the 250,000km in 86 countries they’ve put beneath the wheels of their BMW motorbike during the past decade. Hubbard does the driving while Diana photographs and blogs about their adventures.
“We believe we’re the oldest couple to ride ‘two up’ [on the same bike] around the world, both north to south and east to west,” Hubbard says proudly.
Rocky road
It hasn’t been without incident, such as the mishap they had in remote Mongolia a week into a six-month trip from Tokyo to London. Travelling on a road with potholes so big you could fish in them, Hubbard hit a rock while doing 90km/h and bike and riders ended up in a hole. “We managed to stay on and fortunately we weren’t hurt, but it could quite easily have been a different story,” he says.
The bike didn’t come off so well: tyres were flattened and spokes broken, leaving the couple stranded in the middle of nowhere. A local eventually turned up and bundled them and their bike into the back of a van for the 110km journey to the nearest village.
“No one spoke any English, but all the men of the village came out to see if they could fix it. We found a hotel and came back 12 hours later to find that someone had soldered the spokes and glued the tyres back on. It was a lesson in the ingenuity of people who have had to become good at fixing things, a contrast to our throwaway society.”
Running a successful breakfast cereal company for 30 years buys a lot of luxury travel, but the Hubbards prefer taking the less-expensive road. “The ritzy, glitzy style of travel isn’t us. We’re interested in the history, politics and geography of a place and in meeting the locals, which you can’t really do if you’re staying in expensive hotels or resorts.”
Hubbard’s secret sauce has always been to physically challenge himself – diving, sailing, throwing himself out of aeroplanes and learning to fly. He came to motorbikes later in life, attracted by the way they “let a rider be in the landscape rather than just observing it”.
“On a bike, you see much more than in a car, bus or train. You’re aware of nuances in the landscape, you smell the smells and become more than just a tourist. If you research where you’re going, are careful and assess the risks, then it’s a safe way to travel.”
Their adventures started in 2001 when, after motorcycling around Aotearoa, the parents of two adult children shipped their bike to India and did a group ride into the Himalayas, skirting the border of China and taking the highest drivable road in the world.
In 2012, it was the turn of the Americas. The couple learnt Spanish before wending their way 40,000km south from Alaska, finishing in Patagonia. A year later, they were at it again, circumnavigating Australia for six months, followed by visits to 32 US states in 2014. Two years later, they rode from London to Cape Town via Norway; in 2019, it was Japan to London via the Silk Road, then Montreal to LA.
They’ve embraced every challenge, from sleeping on a repurposed German herring boat from Panama to Cartagena to almost being arrested and deported from Azerbaijan for not having a visa, and having a loaded gun pointed at them in the US.
There was a close encounter with a cow in Tajikistan and an even closer one with a camel in Sudan. Over the years, they’ve eaten horse, fermented shark and fried crickets.
Shaping their own destiny
It’s a long way from Paeroa, where Hubbard spent his early life “in the shadow” of the town’s L&P bottle monument. His father had returned from World War II with a Scottish bride, and the couple set up home on a dairy farm near the small Waikato town.
The first of three children, Hubbard says he was an average student, but in the sixth form decided to “pull finger. I wanted to enrol in the food technology degree that Massey University had just started offering. But I was told by the scholarship panel I didn’t have what it takes to go to university. I was so incensed by that comment I worked my butt off and got into the course under my own steam.”
After university, Hubbard landed a job as a research chemist at a Waikato dairy company. At the time, Prime Minister Robert Muldoon had placed bread under price control, an exception being loaves with milk content higher than 6%. The problem was that milk bread, as it was known, was flat and unappetising.
“Bakers wanted to maximise profits, so we were tasked with developing a milk powder that would produce nice, fluffy loaves.”
After a year’s work, Hubbard’s team was about to launch its product when Muldoon ended the price control and the project was canned. “That taught me to make sure my destiny was never controlled by government rules and regulations.”
He had two job offers – either become a lecturer at his alma mater or a project manager at a fruit-processing plant in Niue. Despite not knowing where Niue was, Hubbard decided to take the three-year contract on the proviso that Diana, a teacher he’d met during a summer holiday job at a Marlborough pea-processing factory, could get a job at the local high school.
Jointly funded by New Zealand and the United Nations, the fruit-processing plant gave Hubbard his first taste of social responsibility.
“It created work for locals and helped them to be self-reliant. It showed me that business has social implications as well as financial.”
Back in Auckland, he landed the assistant-manager role at Tasti Products, becoming chief executive after 13 years. Then in 1987, while on a trip to New York, he and Diana sat on a rock in Central Park and navel gazed.
“I was 40 and had always wanted to set up my own business. I knew it had to be something healthy, not confectionery or soft drinks, so we tossed around the idea of breakfast cereals,” says Hubbard, who adds that every time the couple are in New York, they return to “their” rock.
Diana experimented with various cereals in their Auckland kitchen, and in 1988, the couple launched Winner Foods with two products. It was rebranded two years later to Hubbard Foods.
Rice-bubble riddle
Not everything was an immediate success: Hubbard spent months trying to crack the rice-bubble conundrum. “Every attempt turned into rice pudding, which we’d sell cheap to a local pig farmer. One Saturday morning, I went into work and found one perfect rice bubble. It was a real eureka moment.”
One of Hubbard’s biggest wins was the newsletter he wrote for every cereal box. “It was a way of communicating before social media. We got a lot of positive comments and became known for it.”
Not so positive was the feedback from groups such as the Business Roundtable, which claimed Hubbard’s ethos of social responsibility was tantamount to treason.
“Stephen Tindall from the Warehouse was talking about the same thing, but the Business Roundtable believed the trickle-down theory was the best business model and business had no place doing the socially responsible things we were doing, such as introducing a profit-sharing scheme for all staff and once even taking the whole company to Samoa for the company’s 10th anniversary.”
It didn’t do Hubbard Foods any harm: under his stewardship, the company employed 50 staff and had a turnover of $40 million, supplying cereal not only domestically but also to Coles and Woolworths supermarkets in Australia.
“When we started, I thought we’d have eight or so staff and I’d be able to play golf every Wednesday. Well, that never happened.”
Some would say it was madness to walk away from a successful company to become mayor of Auckland. Especially given Hubbard’s lack of political experience. “I’d always kept local politics at a distance. But in 2004, I was at a meeting at the town hall and sat in the mayor’s chair. I thought, ‘I could do this job.’”
His was such a late entry into the mayoral race that the Electoral Commission had to Photoshop Hubbard’s image alongside those of former mayor Christine Fletcher and incumbent John Banks into publicity material. But Hubbard ended up winning, occupying the mayoral chair from 2004-2007.
Although unpopular for increasing rates 7-8% in the first year, he advanced the electrification of Auckland’s rail network and, along with North Shore mayor George Wood, pushed for the Super City.
“George and I recognised that the previous system was dysfunctional and lacked coherent planning. We took our idea to Helen Clark, then prime minister, and leader of the opposition John Key, who agreed with us.”
When Hubbard lost his 2007 re-election bid, he returned to Hubbard Foods as chair, which freed up time to forge a philanthropic path and eventually led to the Dick and Diana Hubbard Foundation in 2010. In 2018, the Hubbards sold the food business to the HFG Group, later renamed Walter & Wild.
The couple had had a holiday home in Queenstown since 2000. “I’m an alpine man who would rather be in the mountains than on a beach. We started to spend more time at our holiday home, so in the end, sold the Auckland apartment and moved here permanently.”
Banish any thoughts of a leisurely retirement – it took several attempts to get the couple in the same room at the same time for this interview.
And although they’re taking a break from long motorbike trips, the Hubbards haven’t stopped adding stamps to their passports. The couple recently returned from a three-week tour of Oman, where someone else did the driving, and are booked on a cruise down the west coast of Africa.
“We’d like to be remembered as people who loved adventures, who made a difference to New Zealand and helped others, whether through our philanthropy or those we met on our travels,” says Hubbard.