Supreme Award: 2022 Winner Poaka Artisan Cured Meats
Poaka New Zealand was awarded the prestigious Supreme Winner Award title in 2022 after successfully winning both the Artisan and Primary Sector Awards.
A proud history with the New Zealand Food Awards, Poaka New Zealand has been successfully involved for a number of years and has experienced the benefit of entering the awards first-hand.
Josh Hill, owner and operator explains how the exposure of the awards has provided the business with new and exciting opportunities over the years:
“2018 Cuisine Artisan Award runner-up status opened some tightly closed doors. Rather than just being asked to send pricing, we were invited to visit and share samples. And this opened doors previously shut to us. To see is to know…to taste is to understand, as one of our winemaker friends says. Once people were willing to taste what we made the doors began to open wider.
“We were then the 2019 Cuisine Artisan Award winner. This was a key moment for us. While the 2018 second place allowed us to start successfully prospecting with our target customer base, the 2019 win resulted in hospitality and specialty retailer businesses starting to seek out Poaka. As any small business knows, finding customers is one of the most difficult parts of growing your business and with the Cuisine Artisan win, people started looking for us. Identifying and converting new customers to our unique product offering got a whole lot easier.
“The New Zealand Food Awards 2022 category wins have helped Poaka climb the next rung in our business growth. It has given us confidence to invest in major business development has opened doors with larger, specialist customers and suppliers who want to celebrate that Aotearoa producers can (and should) be able to be a high-quality ‘import replacement’substitute for niche, high-value imported products. It continued the change in attitude in the market and showed that diligence, focus and persistence could overcome those early high hurdles set in front of us.”
Entry (extracts):
1. Product Name
Poaka Chorizo
2. Product Description
Poaka Chorizo is the only true Catalonian version of this ancient product made in New Zealand. Our Chorizo is one of our favourite products, as it was in the Catalan region of North East Spain that Josh first immersed himself in the European tradition (religion?) of cured and fermented meats. You could say our Catalan take on Chorizo is our "ground zero" moment.
The chorizo has a primitive origin as it is closely linked to La Matanza or, "the slaughter of the pig," one of the gastronomic traditions, festive, cultural and even religious traditions in most rural villages in Spain.
As with all of our products, our Chorizo starts from animals grown larger and longer than standard issue commodity pigs, and for its best expression requires the slower growing, more fully flavoured muscle mass that comes with a heritage breed, true free range raised animal. And for Poaka, this means finishing our Berkshire and Saddleback pigs on acorns and chestnuts for 3 months.
Poaka Chorizo has a subtle smoky flavour, punctuated with a hint of hot pimenton. Combined with our unique silky, nutty fat, it is a genuine artifact of this ancient Catalan tradition. Poaka only uses natural casings. (It's not possible to make an authentic Chorizo using synthetic casing materials). These are harder to work with, cost more, and deliver variable sized and shaped finished product (characteristics which don't lend themselves to high volume processing). The natural casing helps us achieve what we think is perfect maturing.
Innovation
3. Where did the idea for this product come from?
Poaka breeds and raises its own heritage breed Berkshire and Saddleback pigs on our 100 acre farm west of Christchurch. Unlike most makers of cured meats in New Zealand, we don't buy in boxes of specific meat cuts or scrap/trimmings and create large quantities of the most popular products. We grow whole animals and we process whole animals. Every part of the animal has to do some of the heavy lifting for the business. We butcher all our own pigs, and this allows us to ensure that our salamis include a high proportion of higher value primal cuts than would ordinarily be the case.
In our first few years of business, the Christchurch Farmers Market was a key sales outlet for us. Josh would sometimes make Chorizo for his own consumption, and on a few occasions we ran tastings at the market. We encouraged by the almost ecstatic feedback we got from people of Spanish decent - real Chorizo now available in New Zealand - Who knew? It was their request for a regular supply of Chorizo that resulted in Josh commercialising one of the first recipes he acquired during his time in Spain.
4. How did you determine the product originality?
Poaka does not and cannot compete with commodity, grown pork, and its derivatives. A commodity pig is grown as quickly as possible, with a minimal amount of back fat, and has been genetically selected to deliver a very lean and meaty carcass. Poaka's farming vision was never to try and compete with a mass produced "agri-industrial" product and its attendant impacts.
Our farming system aims to take our animals to the other end of the spectrum, growing our pigs out to a minimum of 100kg carcass weight and often larger. These larger animals are ideally suited to making specialty fermented meats such as the Chorizo we are entering.
Some would say the ultimate expression of a pig, ready to be carefully processed, is the Iberico of southern Spain. In large part, its legendary quality results from the animals feeding on acorns for their last few months. At Poaka we work hard to emulate this magic. Each year we collect many tons of acorns from around the mid-canterbury region (call us if you know a good stand of oak trees - we're always on the lookout!) The acorns are high in Oleic acid, the same Omega-9 fatty acid found in Olive Oil. The Spanish call their acorn finished pigs "olive oil on four legs".
We decided that since customers were asking for it, and our farming system was working to emulate the acorn finished Iberico meat and fat, making an authentic Chorizo was a logical expression of what our animals and artisan processes could achieve.
5. Did you consider any new technology to your company in the development of this product?
Yes. When we started Poaka, we were unsure what the demand would be for a local version of premium cured and fermented meats. People buy what they know and trust. Many kiwis have tried before. Most have failed. We started small, both in terms of infrastructure and equipment. By the time we introduced our Chorizo to our range, demand had grown to the point that we could not add it to the product line and offer regular availability, without a major upgrade to all of our manufacturing and maturing systems.
Poaka has had to work hard to expand our processing facility and maturing chambers to be true to those unique conditions - temperature, humidity, air flow that allow specialty fermented meats like Chorizo to evolve over time and develop all the tertiary flavours the genuine product delivers. Over the course of the last 2 years we have developed our bespoke aging chamber for our Chorizo's. We use state of the art sensors, along with a complex air management system, all working to emulate as close as possible the traditional drying chambers used to make this salame.
6. What were some of the challenges in developing your product and how did you overcome them?
There are lots of resources to assist the enthusiastic amateur in learning how to ferment and air dry meat. There are plenty of home enthusiasts willing to share their successes and failures. But as with many things, e.g. making your own sourdough loaf, there is an exponential step from making a few loaves for yourself to operating a small bakery, where every loaf delivers the value and experience your customers expect.
Air drying un-cooked, fermented meat, over an extended period, to create a premium product, is a highly complex process. In large part, because you are working to emulate the unique "terroir" circumstances that evolved over 100's of years of trial and error. Those who are exceptionally good at it, never share everything. There are always micro nuances missing from the puzzle you can assemble from public domain information. In addition, you are working at the "pointy end" of the food safety spectrum. "UCFM" (UnCooked Fermented Meat) is a segment requiring the highest standards of hygiene and product handling through the entire process, and the highest respect for food safety processes.
Our key challenges have been overcoming difficulties in curing, temperature control, humidity control, and air flow. Because we have fabricated our own maturing room, (as opposed to purchasing off the shelf systems) to support the volume of product we process, each of those elements of production has had to be prototyped, tested, calibrated and then monitored over extended periods.
7. In your food technologist’s words, what was the proudest moment in the product’s journey?
Poaka Chorizo is aiming to replicate a cherished piece of Catalan food tradition. The best Chorizo from the region Josh trained in uses tightly held recipes to deliver a local style. Actual ingredients and quantities are not shared widely. So Josh spent a couple of years of trial and error working to replicate what he had tasted in the north east of Spain. Finally, cutting open a product that you grew for 14 months, then fermented and matured for 4 months, and after a 2 year journey, tasting something you recognise, but need a string of adjectives to describe, and then realising that what you are tasting is what you savored in Spain was truly deja vu!
Sustainability
8. Describe how environmental outcomes have been maximised across the entire life cycle of the product and your company processed for achieving these outcomes?
At Poaka Farm, we try and do the simple things well. There are 6 active programs in operation to support the sustainable, long term operation of our farm, with the aim of leaving our place better than we found it. These are:
1. Maintenance of our local county water races. In Canterbury, as the farming footprint has changed from dry land sheep farming to more dairy focused over the past 30 years, many 100's of kilometres of water races have been filled in. To us this is a travesty, and in recent times, these often historical, hand dug "streams" have been shown to be a major source of recharge for Christchurch's pristine drinking water acquifers. Poaka has worked hard to ensure our local races are maintained and left open even where we have to go off property to ensure this happens. The races offer habitat to native fish species, eels, pukeko, ducks, and frogs, and the white-face heron we love.
2. Animal/pasture management. Free Range farming heritage breed pigs is not for the faint hearted. Some might go so far as to say for the sane. Show me a free range pig farm where the paddocks are full of pasture and the pigs are grazing on a mixture of perennial pasture species? They are nigh well impossible to find. Pigs are built to investigate their environment with their snouts. And those "tough as nails" instruments of destruction will turn any area into a ploughed, then trampled paddock of dust and mud. You can find tutoring on most topics on Youtube. Try and find help on "nose ringing pigs" and you will be disappointed. The Poaka team has had to learn how to nose clip our pigs in a humane way that allows them to still explore their paddock and graze freely, while controlling the majority of their desire to excavate everything in sight. This results in the pigs enjoying consistently available forage, the soil retaining its structure and moisture, and manure nutrients being used to increase soil fertility and plant growth.
3. Trees and Acorns. Each year, Poaka plants several hundred trees. The planting program covers shelter belts, orchard replacement/renewal, and new oak plantings for long term acorn forage. Tree cover, while consuming some productive ground, more than compensates by providing soil protection from the Nor'West winds and ensures our pigs have a range of options for shade and warmth in summer and winter. With 000's of trees planted, we will at some point investigate the relevance of the ETS to our farming program.
Acorns. Acorns are a premium food for our breeds of pig and a unique contributor to the best meat and fat for curing. They are high in oleic acid, a monounsaturated Omega 9 fatty acid. Each year we collect many tons of acorns from Hagley Park in Christchurch and surrounding areas. Our foraging team covers a wider area each year. Collecting acorns and using them as part of our feed regime, not only delivers a premium meat/fat construction for our curing raw material, but we also help suppress the local rat population in parks and other reserve areas which in turn lowers rat borne disease pressure.
4. Sheep. 5 years ago Poaka made the decision to stop using Glyphosate as a broad spectrum herbicide to control weed growth on the farm. This was a hard decision and there were some heated arguments between older generation "sprayers" and Josh. We established a small herd (70) of Pitt Island sheep. They are farmed with zero inputs other than orchard and utility area grass control. This has allowed us to stop spraying the chestnut orchard as well as other non-arable areas of the farm.
5. Compostable and fully biodegradable packaging. Covid was a major curveball for Poaka. Prior to covid, the majority of our customers took whole product, simply packaged in butchers paper, and sliced it on site. As covid hit and our traditional sales channels closed, we pivoted to supply specialty retailers and the New World supermarket chain (we now supply NW's right across the south island, along with key specialty food retailers in the north island). That meant implementing a more complex and sophisticated slicing and vacuum packing line. Over time we have moved to compostable vacuum packs and bamboo meat trays to try and minimise the landfill burden of our business.
6. Organic ingredients. Every little bit counts and you have to start somewhere. Choosing to use organic ingredients (salt, spices) supports organic farming and does that little bit to encourage herbicide and pesticide free production. But as we have found, just because a supplier says it's organic, doesn't mean it is. Further, "organic" doesn't automatically mean more flavour or higher quality. We have had to work hard to find and source the best quality organic ingredients. But they are available and there are people committed to delivering toxin free products, as are we.
9. Provide a specific example of environmental sustainability initiatives related to the product you have entered.
I think our favourite ones go hand in hand - supporting the continued operation of local water races and companion tree planting. Whether it's a pandemic, and earthquake, or a recession, it takes some foresight so as not to be on the side of, "...oh no...what do we do now?...". Our support and maintenance of local races that have pressure from other interests to close them, will (someday) result in better outcomes for not just Poaka, but for other local farming enterprises. Tree planting is a statement of faith in the future. As the saying goes, "...the best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago...the 2nd best time is today...". When the Nor'West blows, we are blessed that some good person chose to plant trees in our front block over 100 years ago. We intend to pass on the favour to those coming behind us. After 30 years of steady planting, whether it's a cold nor'east on a winters day, a southerly storm with snow, or a hot blustery Nor'wester in January, our animals enjoy the benign sheltered paddocks, and our farm retains higher levels of soil moisture.
And lastly, as we learn, we steadily replace exotics with Ribbonwoods in our shelter belts and Kowhai in more hospitable areas. This year will see Coprosma planted for the first time in some of our "tough as nails" areas where we want low screening.
10. Describe how your company consciously addresses social sustainability across the entire life cycle of its products and your company processes for achieving these outcomes.
To deliver an internationally competitive product, at an artisan level scale requires passion, and pride. And not just from the owners, but from the whole team. Our job across the entire operation from farm, through factory, to sales and customer management has been to aim at providing clarity of our goals for the team, to assist them in developing competency in their roles (and the autonomy that follows), and watching them grow and enjoy the results of clarity and competency, in consistent focus and motivation. There is an old saying, "...the best thing about business is people...the worst thing about business is people...". Our goal, and really our first responsibility is to build and manage a team that can deliver every day, and do so in a way that allows them to fulfil their own economic, family, and broader social needs. You can't help out on the school committee if your boss is an a**hole and your remuneration requires you to work a 2nd job.
It is tough to keep good staff. Most people that are good want or need a "side hustle" to meet their goals. We encourage and support all the team through flexible hours, access to equipment, and in one case business investment, to pursue their goals while providing the long term focus we need to be successful in a business based on accumulated "know how".
11. Provide a specific example of social sustainability initiatives related to the product you have entered
We were asked this question three years ago when we entered the awards, and we are most proud of the answer we gave then and have built on since. In 2019 the Poaka team was smaller. Today we have three on the farm team and four on the processing team. Covid has required a monumental effort by everyone. Poaka has worked to provide maximum flexibility and support to our team of employees and contractors, allowing them the time required to either recover, isolate, or support the friends and family affected by the disease and its social consequences and restrictions. We've allowed employees with children required to stay home from school the opportunity to come and do simple independent tasks on the farm while mum or dad continues their work, or rescheduled the work program to fit in with the teams healthcare needs. We've come out of it stronger as a team and the business has become more resilient as a result.
Excellence
12. Briefly outline your product process.
The Poaka vision, from the start, was to build a sustainable, circular production system that would deliver long term, positive benefits to everyone and everything involved. And that meant aiming for product excellence. Sadly, in life and product development you can have 2 of 3 things, but not 3 of three things. You must choose between on time, on budget, and on spec. We chose on spec (make a Chorizo that our Spanish customers would recognise and respect) and on budget. Time would be sacrificed to get it right. Because our aim was to become New Zealand's premium cured meat producer, we planned for and built out for a large enough facility to grow into our dream. We could have invested in "off the shelf, turnkey" curing and maturation chambers, but the scale of our ambition made those options uneconomic from a capital investment perspective. Further, installing a "black box" curing system exposes the business to risk of catastrophic failure if there is a system failure and local support is unavailable in a timely fashion. But, to do all this has meant a 6 year journey starting at ground zero with our animal genetics.
More specific to the development of our Chorizo product, Josh has had to develop his recipe and process, prototype, make, test and then redo (many times) each step of a complicated production process to ensure that what's inside the "black box" of a large piece of air drying meat is true to type, and doesn't end up in the rubbish. In many businesses (software development especially) you can go through several design/build/test cycles in a week. To go through a design/build/test cycle for a premium Chorizo has taken around 24 months. And then as you eagerly open up something you started growing almost two years earlier, only to find a problem with curing, or drying, texture, or flavour profile, it's pretty easy to feel like giving up.
Key to developing our Chorizo product has been our introduction, use, and regular calibration of a range of electronic sensor technology to control humidity, temperature and equilibrium vapour pressure.
13. How did you determine the product’s likely success in the market?
In the early 1900's the best hitter in American baseball was a guy called Ty Cobb. He may have been the best batter in the history of baseball. When asked why he was so successful at the plate, he responded, "....I hit it where they ain't...". When we looked at the options available to us for adding a new fermented salami to our product line, we noted the absence of any local suppliers of a really authentic Chorizo product. In the early days we worked actively with people who knew, and had experience of of very high quality cured chorizo.
GIULIO STURLA, the Cuisine magazine chef of the year, 2018 offered us support in our start up phase. He noted,
"...I am always looking for a good piece of jamon [dry cured ham]. There's a unique flavour when it's done right – this is not the animal, it's how it is made and what the animal eats. Last year I found a pork producer in Canterbury, called Poaka, which is Māori for pig. He finishes the pork with chestnuts. It's the closest thing to Spanish ham I have found here..."
This gave us the confidence to believe we could reproduce an authentic, iconic, Spanish Chorio variant, and to invest resources in developing this unique local version of this artifact.
14. Demonstrate the product/business’s success with sales and distribution information
Above we have listed some of the locations where Poaka products, including Chorizo can be purchased. As a privately owned company we do not publish financial information. What we can say is that we sell everything we produce and can provide list of customers who will offer similar experiences to what Giulio Sturla is quoted as saying.
Our products are unique locally. When covid hit and almost all of our traditional sales channels either closed, went into hibernation, or had to do their own "covid pivot" to survive, we lost most of our sales channels. That we operate today with a better business, a broader customer base, more sophisticated manufacturing, and a larger and better qualified team, and an improved farming operation, through the tough patch of the last two years, is a testament to Josh sticking with his dream and following his passion - to make New Zealand's best cured and fermented meats, a worthy alternative to the best that the masters of Spain and Italy make using generations of acquired know-how, AND to a team of excellent people who go above and beyond what their employment contracts stipulate. If there's gold buried here, it's somewhere inside them.
15. Has any alternative technology advanced the product development or launch?
Yes. Poaka is an Artisan manufacturer, using traditional methods and time to replicate iconic cured meat products, developed over 00's of years of experimentation. Our original path to market was in the supply of "whole" (unsliced) fermented salami and cured meats to premium restaurants and cellar doors around New Zealand. Our Chorizo, after two years of development, came on stream about the same time that Covid-19 began to see the shutdown/hibernation of the hospitality channels that were our core paths to market.
Poaka was faced with the same set of challenges and choices as many of our customers and colleagues - historical channels shutting, core end users no longer purchasing (particularly tourists), and production systems (particularly the farming side of the operation) that would cost tens of thousands to shut down, and which might not be able to be restarted in the same way.
We had to find new markets, with a new type of end user, and we aimed at the specialty grocery and supermarket segments. But for a relatively small scale artisan producer to compete there with large entrenched suppliers, most of which are just "product re-packagers", i.e. importing european produced product and slicing and packaging, required the reconfiguration of our manufacturing facility and investment in new production technology. Poaka invested in a state-of-the art automatic slicing system. This was the only way we could compete. The machine, worth well north of $100,000 has allowed us to scale our slicing and packaging process without any loss of quality. As a result, we have been able to maintain full production on the farm and in the factory, during a period where our historical base virtually disappeared, and historical sales revenue dropped by over 80%.
16. What customer or market research expertise have you used?
There is a certain type of person that frequents the weekend farmers markets around the country. Amongst them are "foodies" who find a weekend "forage" at the market an important part of sourcing their weekly provisions.
Poaka spent the first 3 years of business operation, as a weekly attendee at the Christchurch Farmers Market. Over that time we developed a number of friendships and became acquainted with a large contingent of "new" New Zealanders. Many from Spain and South America regularly asked if we would consider making a Chorizo to add to our Italian focused offerings. After being "harassed" for many months, Josh started the product development process. As part of the journey to a "finished product" our quarterly test product (it takes around 3 months to mature a good Chorizo) would be shared at the market with people who came from regions where Chorizo was a staple, and who eagerly awaited a locally made alternative. Their feedback (...to soft...to hard...not enough pimenton dulce...not enough pimenton picante...etc) was critical in developing an authentic Chorizo.
17. Have you created or developed a new market with your product? How do you know this?
In the broadest sense, Poaka Chorizo is an "import replacement" for the Spanish products imported into New Zealand. Because our product is fresher than the imported cured meat alternatives, it is becoming a favourite of growing number of chefs who incorporate it into a wide range of interesting dishes.
18. What markets is the product currently in and what are your future markets? Please provide any relevant sales and distribution information.
Poaka does something no one else is doing in New Zealand and very few anywhere. Pasture raising heritage breed pigs and finishing them on tree nuts. By its very nature this is labour intensive and cannot be operated on a large scale. You can industrially scale barley or wheat production, but not acorns or chestnuts. To that end, Poaka will always be a niche "super premium" supplier.
We have been operating for just over 6 years, and still, many consumers would rather pay more money for an average (lower) quality imported product, that has european branding on it, than "take the risk" with a locally made alternative. Fair enough. As Antony Gradiska from Gibbston Valley once told us, "...many have tried to do what you are doing...no one has succeeded...".
So, Poaka will continue to focus on becoming the premium supplier of fermented and cured meats in New Zealand, and aim at rebuilding our market position as a core supplier to the premium food and wine operators in Aotearoa.
