FResh GROwER WORDS VICKI RAVLICH-HORAN
You’ll recognise the face—if not the real thing then the caricature from the Fresh Growers packaging. Putting his name and face to his range of greens is just one of the innovative moves that Allan Fong has made to grow the business started by his father and grandfather. A family business, with the fourth generation coming on, Fresh Growers’ roots began when Allan’s grandfather and father arrived in New Zealand in the 1940s. They began as labourers in market gardens before the Fong clan created a co-op with other families from their village in China. With the premise of Hop-Lee, together we benefit, the group began growing in Parnell then Panmure before moving to Pukekohe. Over the years, as the families expanded, they would branch out on their own—and in the 1960s that’s exactly what Allan’s family did. At the time, growers expanded by borrowing from the markets, this in turn locked them into supply contracts. When Allan joined the business, he borrowed from the rural bank. This was the first of many moves which would set the family business on a path which has seen it not only grow but flourish. The Fresh Grower is the last of the Fong clan of market gardeners still growing. By borrowing from a bank, Allan had more freedom with what he grew and how he marketed it. And what the Fresh Grower grows has been a key difference. “Desperation,” Allan laughs, was the real motivation to do
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something different. “We were getting too small to be mainstream,” he says. Allan believed there were markets to tap into, younger people who had travelled, rising demand from the increase in ethnic cuisines. I’m sitting in the Fresh Growers office with Gus Tissink from Bidfresh Hamilton. Allan ducks to the kitchen to show us a daikon (Japanese radish) they are currently experimenting with. Growing something different can be a risky business, don’t sell it and it will literally rot in the field! Which is why relationships with those like Gus are important. Convincing the public to buy tonnes of daikon would be an expensive task yet introducing chefs to an interesting new ingredient is not so. “Restaurants and chefs lead food trends,” says Gus, “and chefs are always interested in new ingredients, so it
