Honest to goodness

Words by Jo Elwin

Frustration at the lack of bulk food options that suited their zero waste lifestyles led sisters Nicola Cross and Emma Brown to create the Honest Wholefood Co. And if anyone can name their company honest it’s Nicola - a very likeable Southland girl who calls a spade a spade – especially when it comes to sustainability and our relationship with plastic.

“As a society it’s ridiculous how reliant we are on plastic,” says Nicola. “It enrages me. We all need to start doing what we can, right now, and that’s why we encourage our customers as much as possible by educating and empowering them. We are trying to get to 100 per cent waste free in our operations and we are being very transparent about it. There are too many companies that operate as ‘plastic-free’ in the front end but the back end is just a horrific mess of plastic.”

Nicola shows me a sack of soft plastic, explaining that for cost-effectiveness and to ensure good supply they have to accept some of their product in plastic, but is quick to point out that they don’t throw plastic out. “I can’t deal with that so I am stockpiling it and trying to find a business that I might be able to work with to recycle it. It’s important to me that we’re not just passing the buck to someone else and we are constantly working with our suppliers to cut out wasteful packaging. It’s our dream for everything to come in recycled paper bags that can be sent back to the producer for refilling because even paper has an impact on our environment – it takes a crap load of energy to produce. We absorb the freight costs to send our coffee bags back to the producer to refill for our orders and reusing the bags cuts down their costs, so that’s a dream result. Little Foot cleaning products use all-natural products and they take back our 20-litre containers to refill. We send back 12 containers at a time in a big sack and we halve the freight costs which makes it more expensive for them (it’s cheaper to get new containers produced, that’s the world we live in) but it’s a business decision and we are like that too – cutting out waste is our main priority in a way. Obviously, we’re a business and we need to make money but there are underlying things that we just will not do.”

All Honest Wholefood Co. suppliers are carefully considered. “It’s hard but we do what we can,” Nicola says. “We try to balance zero waste with environmental impact, but affordability also comes into it. Organic oats are a good example - we get quick, rolled and steel cut oats from Harraways and they’re great, they come in big paper sacks. But, because of the low demand in New Zealand, their organic oats are about four times the price of the organic oats we can get from Canada which unfortunately come in plastic-lined sacks. It’s not ideal but it’s the only way we can supply organic oats at a reasonable price. We need to change our way of thinking. We need to say, ‘okay New Zealand-grown is more expensive but that means I just can’t afford as much’. Once we start supporting New Zealand growers, product will become cheaper and we can save the impact that importing from Canada has on our environment too. They are hard decisions, but we are making improvements every week and I do a lot of work on that side of the business, encouraging suppliers to think differently. We used to get olive oil in 15-litre containers that had plastic bladders (like a wine cask). We now get a 200-litre plastic-free drum. The worst case we’ve had is organic cacao nibs that came in a paper bag with two plastic linings and the paper bag was wrapped in plastic. I got straight on the phone and told them not send us that again. We’ve got too used to thinking that’s the norm and it’s not. Sometimes organics aren’t aligned to zero waste as well as they should be.”

For nationwide delivery, orders are packed into compostable paper bags and recycled glass jars and couriered in a cardboard box.

From their bulk supplies, Nicola and Emma fill Honest Wholefoods Co. customers’ containers to order, which is done online at honestwholefoodco.co.nz. They will pick up containers in the Hawea/Wanaka/Luggate area, dropping them back once filled. Nicola says “It’s super simple. You can go to your pantry, order what you need, put your bags of containers at the door and you don’t have to think about it again.” People just outside of the delivery area can drop their bags of containers at Nicola’s door. For nationwide delivery, the girls will pack orders into compostable paper bags and recycled glass jars and have them couriered in a cardboard box. The bags and jars can then be delivered back, free of charge, for refilling.

It’s very industrious and it all started from Nicola’s Hawea home which she shrugs off, saying, “When we came up with the idea it had to be convenient and cost-effective. We looked at places in town but couldn’t find anywhere.” Nicola’s builder husband has made a great job of converting the garage into Honest Wholefoods Co. HQ, but they do plan to move the business eventually and Nicola is quick to add, “It still won’t be a retail space, we will continue to be an online business based in a warehouse that’s not my home because that situation is a little tricky, not that much fun.” But thanks to family they are making it work. Emma helps Nicola juggle her two young boys when they are packing at bedtime and their parents are close by in Albert Town. “Mum and Dad are amazing” Nicola says with relief. “The boys are at Kanuka Corner – an awesome little pre-school at the end of the road and Mum has them one day a week. It’s not the ideal balance, but we’re only a few months in so it’s early days.”

The kids also challenge Nicola’s waste-free home where they have no rubbish bin anymore because they don’t produce rubbish. “We recycle minimal amounts and we compost a lot, but sometimes with kids you just have to opt for convenience. This week I had to buy one thing in plastic packaging at the supermarket and that’s toothpaste. I make my own for my husband and I but my four-year-old won’t use it and the drama isn’t worth it. That’s one of those things that chew me up inside and I just have to go ‘right it’s one small thing’. But that’s where Teracycle comes in. They work with big brands, Colgate being one of them, to recycle their products. I collect a bag of stuff – Crayola, Bic Pens and The Collective yoghurt pouches are some of the other products they recycle – print off a ticket from their website (teracycle.com) and send it off to them. It’s free. This doesn’t encourage me to buy their products but when I have hard decisions to make like buying toothpaste Teracycle help me make that decision. A lot of people think zero waste is inconvenient, but I think it’s more convenient because if I run out of something every day, such as toothpaste, I can make my own within minutes. Whereas I would have to drive to town, go to the supermarket and end up buying things I don’t need. Costing me more money and time.

Nicola’s natural zero waste tooth powder

1/4 cup baking soda
10-20 drops 100 per cent pure peppermint essential oil
1/4 tsp 100 per cent natural stevia powder

1 Mix all the ingredients together in a jar or other container with a lid. Shake together vigorously to ensure that peppermint oil is mixed through thoroughly. At this stage have a little taste - if it seems to strong with baking soda or peppermint add a little more stevia and if it’s too sweet add a little more baking soda and peppermint. Store in an airtight jar.

2 To use, dip a wet toothbrush in the powder each time you brush.

Honest Wholefood Co. stock a lot of ingredients such as vinegar, baking soda, washing soda and borax for people who make their own cleaning products and Nicola posts DIY recipes, along with recipes for tasty edibles, on the honestwholefoodco.co.nz blog. It gives Nicola hope. “People are really into it, I guess they are listening and understanding that chemicals and toxins are no good for us.” Nicola enjoys the blogging. “I have become a cook because of all of this. I have always been interested in nutrition and now, with the kids, it has become more important to me. I try to make my own wherever possible and I am very disciplined, I just won’t buy plastic, but I do understand that it’s not that easy for others. I am always saying to our customers that everyone’s family life and circumstances are different so never think you are doing a shit job if you can’t do what someone else is doing, just do what you can, make the changes that work for you – it’s better to be doing that than writing it off completely.”

With Honest Wholefood Co. taking care of pantry staples, Nicola points to the garden outside when I mention vegetables. “We’re doing what we can here, we started with all lawn but I think lawn is pointless so I dug it in to garden beds. Eventually I will dig it all up. I’m working on a tunnel house out the front and a big long potato bed, but I have to be tactful on the way I sell that to my husband,” laughs Nicola. “He doesn’t really care he’d just rather that he didn’t have to do it. He makes the infrastructure for the garden beds using recycled timber from building sites and I do all the gardening and weeding.” There’s already a tunnel house made of recycled materials and an impressive set of compost bins made of wooden pallets behind a hedge in the back garden.

Meat comes from The Butcher’s Block in Reece Crescent, Wanaka. “I take my own containers and buy organic and free-range wherever possible. We don’t eat a lot of meat. I am vegetarian but my kids and husband aren’t quite there yet. He’s off a farm in South Canterbury and I grew up on a farm in Southland so we’ve both grown up with meat.” Nicole’s vegetarian repertoire tends to be quick curries and spicy dishes that the kids won’t eat but she’s aware that if she had more time to cook, she could make it more exciting for them all. “I’ll get there eventually,” she says.

 “We are not materialistic.” Nicola says of her family life. “We live a very basic life now and I think the more basic it is the happier we get. The less stuff we have, get or receive the happier we are, and Emma and I are applying that to our business. We try and create as little as we can – we even reuse the string from the sacks for the name tags that we tie to customers bags. We send all our deliveries out in reused boxes,” she says pointing to a mess of boxes on a shelf in the storeroom. “They would be heading to be recycled so we use them again and hopefully again and again and again. We don’t have a lot of marketing collateral and we don’t have business cards; we are looking at other ways to get our contact details out there. We are thinking about the end result in every decision we make – where is it going? What is it going to do to our environment?”

Right now, Nicola’s perfect day would be one spent in the garden with her kids and husband.

Nicola studied marketing at Otago University and has worked in marketing and media ever since. Emma is an accountant and Nicola laughs as she explains, “We are both good at what we do and terrible at what the other does so it’s making for an effective business partnership. I don’t do analytics, I just need to know are we making money? Are we doing something good? Is this working? I don’t need details and Emma is the same with the creative stuff such as social media.” After graduating Uni both girls spent a fair amount time overseas and Nicola has recently lived in Christchurch and Queenstown before settling in Hawea. “Emma lived a very waste free life in Sydney and the realisation that she wasn’t able to do it here really hit home,” says Nicola. “I was driving 45 minutes down to the Alexandra Binn Inn with two kids and it wasn’t smart.” So, it was out of sheer frustration and not wanting to accept that it’s okay to buy rice in a plastic bag every second week and just chucking the bag away that they started Honest Wholefood Co. in July this year. Is it going as planned? “A lot of people ask me that question and I honestly don’t know,” says Nicola. “We planned the supply and delivery side of things carefully, but we didn’t make a business plan as such. We didn’t even think ‘what if it’s a fail?’ Our investment wasn’t huge - we didn’t have to go into a retail space, we didn’t have to purchase signage and we didn’t have to make it look pretty. I guess we thought if we fail we’ve tried. We are selling a lot of product so that’s good. People were waiting on it in this area and we have a lot of customers in Queenstown. They will come for a drive to drop their containers and we’ll courier them back to them or they arrange a time to come over, we refill while they go for a walk and they take them back with them. The West Coast is a massive one, a lot of West Coasters come to Wanaka for their shopping anyway, so we try and work in with that. That was very important for us when we were setting up online, we wanted to come across as small, approachable, friendly, go just-about-over-the-top on customer service. Price was important because convenience and price are the main drivers for people. Our prices are on par with the supermarket and we are cheaper on some things. We keep our margins low because people won’t choose zero waste if it’s more expensive and they won’t choose it if it’s harder.”

“We try to partner with as many local brands as we can. We get honey locally, the soaps come from Bare Naked Soaps up the road – they’re amazing. The tea is from KeriKeri, but we battled to find a plastic-free teabag – most teabags have plastic in them, or the sealant is plastic. These are 100 per cent paper and they use a food grade glue to seal them. I put them in my compost and they break down quickly. We’re going to be stocking Yum granola – that started in Hawea - because we’ve just worked out a way for them to send us product in the 20 litre pails they get their coconut oil in. They will wash them and put our product in to them, we’ll empty that into customers’ containers and send the pails back to them. No waste created in that process! We get milk from Windy Ridge and are looking at getting their delivery guys to take peanut butter jars back and forth to Bay Road peanut butter in Dunedin. It’s about connections with like-minded businesses. Businesses, the smaller ones anyway, are really starting to care and larger corporations need to follow suit. Hopefully product stewardship will help with that and I hope it happens very quickly because it needs to. It’s about pushing back responsibility to them too. Whenever there’s anything we’re not happy with, I don’t care if we’re a little supplier, I make it known to them because other people just suck it up and it becomes the norm.”

The business is (err … sorry) growing organically. “I do online advertising – google ads and a little bit of Facebook but it’s mostly been through word of mouth and social media. Miriama Kamo discovered us and posted us and a few people have shared us on the Zero Waste in NZ Facebook page. We’re mindful that we want to grow steadily so that we don’t run in to any massive issues. We want to do it right. To listen and ask our customers where they think we should go because they are who it must work for. It’s a learning process.

If she wasn’t juggling family and business you would find Nicola running in the hills but right now her perfect day would be one spent in the garden with the kids and her husband. “We’re at the stage of life with young kids where it’s hard to do too much or go too far. I try to limit my trips to town to three times a week. I go to the Food and Produce Market at the Wanaka Recreation Centre on a Wednesday during those pocket periods when there’s not a lot growing in the garden and we’ll take a drive to Cromwell for fruit.” The long-term goal is to move somewhere with more land and be fully sustainable. “I’d like to go off grid and live off some land on the West Coast but my husband says I’d last five minutes and is finding more middle ground in Hawea Flat. But we’re a wee way off that yet, we have to make a bit of money first.” Nicola says frankly.

A few of my favourite things

I bloody love Wastebusters, they are doing some really good stuff. We are very lucky to have them in the community from an educational point of view too. The team that work for Wastebusters are all so knowledgeable and helpful and doing an amazing job leading the way in waste reduction and sustainability within our community.

One Community – Monique and the team at One have just recently run the One Summit in Wanaka and Queenstown and it was an incredibly inspiring week where we learnt so much. One is based off the UN sustainability goals and they try and educate people in New Zealand on those goals.

Plastic Free Wanaka are awesome and again helping to educate and inspire the Wanaka community. We are super lucky here as there are a lot of people who genuinely care which is cool. There are a lot of little causes and regular humans doing truly incredible stuff which inspires us every day.