Could New Zealand made peanut butter soon contain New Zealand grown peanuts? & More News Here

Pic’s spends $10 million a 12 months on peanuts grown abroad. Its founder hopes to in the future have the ability to spend a few of that cash in Northland as a substitute.

“I’m 70 this year and I’m fairly blind,” Bruce “Pic” Picot tells me. The founding father of Pic’s Peanut Butter says he can’t learn spreadsheets “or anything boring like that” – he simply likes to make stuff. “There are more than enough people doing marketing and bloody sitting in front of computers and doing data analysis,” he says. “Making stuff is a fantastic thing to be doing.”

He’s worn a number of completely different hats in his lifetime – leather-based sandal maker, travelling rock musician, restaurateur and crusing college proprietor to call just some – however peanut butter has been his bread and butter since 2007. Compelled to create a superior unfold to the mass-produced, overly candy product he discovered stacked on grocery store cabinets, Picot produced his first batch of peanut butter utilizing a tonne of Australian peanuts in a concrete mixer turned roaster in his storage, and bought it on the native farmers’ market in sunny Nelson.

That product is now roasted, crushed and packed at Peanut Butter World, Pic’s Nelson headquarters, and shipped nationwide and all over the world to Australia, China, southeast Asia, the UK and the US. Over the final decade, Pic’s and different boutique manufacturers like Fix & Fogg, Nut Brothers and Forty Thieves have emerged within the nut butter house, satisfying tastebuds and persevering with to stoke the perennial debate about which peanut butter texture is the most effective (crunchy all the best way).

The purpose I’m talking with Picot now’s as a result of Pic’s operations have simply gone photo voltaic. Nearly 500 photo voltaic panels have been put in on the manufacturing facility’s roof, and the renewable energy will cowl a minimum of a fifth of the manufacturing facility’s annual vitality demand – that’s sufficient energy to roast 3.3 million peanuts on a sunny day, or 124,000 jars every month. The photo voltaic array will assist cease some 31 tonnes of carbon from getting into the ambiance yearly, Pic’s basic supervisor Stuart Macintosh says, and can scale back the enterprise’s whole emissions by 5% every year. Macintosh says it’s “a step in the right direction”.

Pic’s vitality initiative is simply the newest measure the corporate has adopted to reduce the influence of local weather change. Picot, a self-described “one-time hippie”, says individuals nonetheless don’t realise what a “catastrophe” local weather change will probably be. “But once it starts to bite, people will – first of all – they’ll do the easiest thing first. They won’t give up driving around in their cars for a nice day at the beach very quickly, but they can choose which product they buy.”

And ideally that product will probably be Pic’s peanut butter. It’s high-protein, plant-based and made in New Zealand – though in the intervening time it’s made from peanuts grown in Australia, Brazil, Zambia and Nicaragua. One day, although, it might be made from peanuts grown in Aotearoa. Pic’s and a handful of different events, together with the Ministry of Primary Industries, Plant & Food Research and native Northland landowners, teamed up in October 2020 to check the likelihood. The six-month trial in Te Tai Tokerau proved that Spanish hi-oleic peanuts – greatest suited to creating peanut butter as a result of their excessive oil content material makes them ultimate for crushing – might be grown commercially within the area.

Pic’s produced 4 jars of “NZ’s first ever homegrown peanut butter” from the primary trial crop final 12 months. One of the jars is now on show at Peanut Butter World, whereas the one one put up on the market fetched $3,150 in a charity public sale on Trade Me. “It tastes amazing, but don’t open it,” was Picot’s recommendation to the client. “Leave it for your grandchildren.”

Another trial, which began final November and can run till 2024, hopes to ascertain a enterprise case giving traders, landowners, growers and farmers the arrogance they should diversify into peanut rising, says Vaughan Cooper, the overall supervisor of funding and infrastructure at Northland Inc, the company answerable for the area’s financial growth. “While it’s already clear that returns are possible from peanuts, we also need to factor in the commercial equipment required for harvesting and drying. We’ll be doing extensive economic modelling to determine whether the costs are worthwhile when producing peanuts at scale.”

Still, native crops can come up brief. Just final week, Edmonds, whose sacks of flour are labelled with “proudly made in NZ”, stated it might quickly have to make use of Australian wheat after “adverse wheat growing conditions” within the South Island pressured them to pivot. Pic’s hasn’t been immune to provide chain points both – Picot says it was so brief on peanuts at one stage throughout the pandemic that employees needed to “clean everything twice, three times, and take their holidays”. Since it began in 2007, even “terrifying” worth will increase from its important Australian provider have made the enterprise realise it wants different suppliers from completely different nations, to keep away from turning into too depending on one supply. Picot is reluctant to wager on Aotearoa supplying all of Pic’s wants although. “We’d still want to maintain those relationships with other producers in other parts of the world,” he says, “because the last thing we want is for us, a peanut butter manufacturer, to run out of peanuts.” 

Nonetheless, the prospect of changing – probably as soon as 2025 – a few of its abroad peanuts with “local stuff”, making peanut butter from them “and then exporting it if you want to, but actually feeding ourselves first, is pretty valuable”, says Picot. “We spend $10m a year on importing stuff, and the idea of spending that in Northland just blows me away.”

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