7 minute read
Food for Thought Tackling the
FOOD
FOR
Dio Old Girl Janene Draper (Eder, 1982) founded and co-owns the hugely successful Auckland chain Farro Fresh with her husband, James.
Now Janene has joined forces with her sister, Leysa Ross, to tackle the growing problem of food wastage. Their initiative, Waste-Not Kitchen, takes meat that would otherwise be thrown out at expiry date and makes it into a range of hearty soups that are both sold and given to community groups.
Every year Kiwis send 157,389 tonnes of edible food to landfill. New Zealand supermarkets waste 60,500 tonnes of food a year, with meat and fish accounting for around one-fifth of that wastage. Janene and Leysa are passionate about doing something about this issue – and are seizing the chance to help some worthy charities in the process.
“Food wastage is a huge problem,” says Janene. “We’ve got enough food wastage in New Zealand to feed the city of Dunedin for two years. I’ve been frustrated with how we have handled the meat wastage we have at Farro, and in the food industry as a whole.”
Across Farro’s six stores, there’s approximately 20kg of wasted meat per week, which was equating to about six tonnes of meat thrown out a year.
“It just sickened me,” says Janene. “We know that more energy is required to produce meat than any other food source, so my philosophy is, if we have gone to the effort to make it, let’s not waste it!”
Janene and Leysa carefully worked on the recipes for their Waste-Not Kitchen soups to ensure they were hearty and nutritious with around 20 percent protein. Turners & Growers have donated surplus and ‘ugly’ veggies to complement the surplus Farro meat, and Davis Food has also helped with gifting all the dry ingredients.
“At the end of the last day of retail, we freeze down any surplus meat just like you’d do at home with meat that’s about to expire – you put it in the freezer for another day. We do this in a commercial environment, so we ensure the meat remains fresh.”
Over winter the soups have been sold at
Farro. For every soup bought at retail, the registered charity will donate one to families in need at the Auckland
Women’s Refuge or children participating in the I Have A Dream Charitable Trust. Waste-
Not Kitchen also works with The Attainable Trust.
Within just two months of launching, Waste-Not Kitchen has saved one and half tons of meat from landfill and donated over 2,000 meals to nourish the lives of those in need. Leysa now works full time as its GM. Dio Old Girl Nina Welanyk Brown, is also on the Trust’s board, bringing a wealth of knowledge in both community not-forprofit and financial understanding.
Big plans for the future
The Waste-Not Kitchen is a twofold initiative that not only makes use of surplus meat that would normally end up in landfill, but it also helps women and families in dire situations. The second phase of the project for 2020 is to take things to the next level.
“We want to not only hand out the soups, but to give women a step up,” explains Janene. “Next year we’re hoping to have kitchens where we can bring the women in to learn basic cooking techniques and take the meals they have cooked home for their families. We would also like to do ‘Soup Sundays’ to give the children a healthy nutritious meal before they go to school on a Monday.”
Many of the women who end up in a refuge have little work experience and few job skills. Some have never really learnt to cook, so Janene sees this initiative as a great way to teach these women valuable skills, give them confidence and help them feed their families nutritional meals.
It’s not just Women’s Refuge that’s benefitting from the Waste-Not Kitchen initiative. Janene and Leysa are also helping the I Have a Dream Charitable Trust, which pairs kids growing up in material hardship with mentors to help them to achieve academic and life success.
“We’re been providing soups to their after-school programme, giving them a really nutritious meal at the end of the school day. We’re also working with The Attainable Trust in South Auckland, which helps people with disabilities to achieve to their full potential. They have a working kitchen and we pay them to make our soups and we also gift them some of our soups to feed those who attend the Trust’s day programme.”
Over summer the Trust is keen to help low-decile schools and other community groups that might need surplus meat to cater camps or other gatherings.
“We’re starting with small steps, but one day hope to be able to take all the surplus meat from every supermarket nationwide. It’s exciting. We’ve already had meetings with a few other retailers and they’re keen to come on board next year. The mission is zero meat wastage nourishing the lives of those in need.”
to nourish the lives of those in need.
Where it all began
In the academic stream at Dio, Janene took maths and sciences, but she always loved food tech – a subject at that time she was steered away from at school. After leaving Dio, she studied optometry, established her own practice and worked in this field for 10 years. But throughout it all, her passion for food and cooking never died.
“Every spare minute outside of examining a patient, I was always in a cookbook and going to cooking lessons. Once a week, I’d visit an ex-cordon bleu chef and she would teach me recipes and French techniques. Food has always been my passion.”
When she was pregnant with the second of her three sons (all now in their early 20s), Janene stopped practising optometry and took a break to raise her boys. In 2006, she and James established Farro after three years living in Wellington where James had been running driving ranges and golf shops. Janene says it was the perfect way to combine their complementary skills and passions. “I always had a mindset that I wanted to have my own business. In Wellington I loved the Moore Wilson concept. There was nothing really like it as a one-stop shop in Auckland, so I thought I’d like to open something like that here. I had the food passion and James had the business acumen. We shared an office the whole time we were in at Farro on a day-to-day basis. We never overlapped in what we did in the business. I’d always work on the products and the marketing side and he did the business, so it worked really well.”
With six Auckland stores and a loyal customer base, Farro recently turned 13. Janene and James took on a CEO two years ago and the plan is to open more Auckland stores.
“It’s been fantastic for us to step back and work at board level, working on the business rather than day to day in it. It’s freed us up a lot, which has enabled me to do other projects – such as Waste-Not Kitchen – and to play a bit of golf with other Dio Old Girls.
“It’s been a really lovely transition. I still work on new product development and the recipes for the videos for Farro. I’ve been able to work out what my passions are in the business and where my value-add is.”
Janene is also now enjoying the chance to mentor other entrepreneurs and start-ups, as they go through their own business growth.
Looking back to her Dio days, she says she thrived there. A prefect and head of Cochrane house, she was also SubSacristan and in the top netball team from Form 4 (Year 10).
“I loved school and I have very fond memories of Dio. It was a really lovely solid background that I grew up with, a real community, and it gave me a desire to want to achieve. Today I still have that community that I can reach out to. A lot of the people who have become great friends over the years weren’t even necessarily in my year at School. If I’d had daughters, Dio certainly would’ve been my first option for them.”
