idends over the past two to three years, and Kouwenhoven now knows it was worth the risk and the significant investment. 24 hours North America www.foodtechnology.co.nz 37 makes it a good staging area for supplying Guangzhou, Beijing and other cities in China. We sell through a couple of online portals and are building our own portal so clients can buy different quantities of mussels, crayfish, paua and tuatua. We package it all up and have it on their doorstep either that afternoon or first thing the next day.” Future Cuisine has already exceeded sales projections in China, and Kouwenhoven has no doubt it’s been the right move. His only regret is not having done it five years ago. “The middle and upper classes in China are growing at an exponential rate so our products have many happy homes.” Many of these customers have fully embraced online marketing, and with billions of online transactions daily in China, internet sales promise to be Future Cuisine’s biggest growth area. Aside from its rapidly growing online platform, Future Cuisine’s customers in China include a wholesale base; retail sales into two supermarket chains (including the upmarket City’Super chain); and food-service clients (restaurants and caterers). Tradition meets innovation In the 1980s, Kouwenhoven built a commercial smokehouse in Auckland, adding a packing and chill-down facility in 2008. The only operation of its kind in the Southern Hemisphere, it combines traditional artisanal smoking techniques with modified retort-packaging technology. “We use manuka wood and everything’s loaded into our smoke houses by hand. It’s very labour intensive,” explains Kouwenhoven. “Once the seafood is smoked, we chill it down really quickly, thermoform it in special packaging, and retort it using cascading hot water to produce a beautiful tender smoked product with a six-month chilled shelf life.” The facility has really started paying div- South America Shanghai Australia 3 hours 12 hours 12 hours 12 hours 11 hours FCL sends its smoked retort-packaged seafood to China, Singapore, Hong Kong, Dubai and Australia. Its mussel meat and half-shell mussels are sold throughout the Middle East (including Jordan, Israel and Qatar), in Europe, from Scotland to Russia, as well as in the United States. The mark of quality The son of Dutch immigrants to New Zealand, Kouwenhoven is staunchly proud to be a Kiwi and to fly the New Zealand flag when doing business abroad. He believes our aquaculture industry has done an excellent job of marketing New Zealand seafood internationally. “New Zealand greenshell mussels are exported to nearly 80 countries around the world. It’s quite an amazing feat when you look at the cost of our products versus products coming out of China, Chile and Europe,” he says. “There are countries – Norway, Finland, Ireland and Iceland, for example – that also do some phenomenal seafood products, but New Zealand is the best at marketing our beautiful little country and what we do well. I embrace that 100 percent. “What NZ Story has done with the FernMark Licence Programme is stunning. All the packaging we put into China has the silver fern on it and that’s worth its weight in gold there because it represents quality and is backed by a New Zealand Government agency. Joining FernMark is difficult but it’s very worthwhile. Intellectual property protection is built into the programme, and for us as a small company forging our way through China, that’s priceless.” Branching beyond seafood Kouwenhoven has always had a knack for listening to his customers, so when they asked for more products, he responded accordingly. Future Cuisine is just weeks away from launching a honey product for sale in China. Having established a good supply chain, it’s redesigned some locally sourced products for export under the FernMark programme. Not content to stop at honey, Kouwenhoven is also looking to diversify into wine and then premium pet food – both driven by inquiries from existing clients and online portals. “Our clients are always after something new,” he says. “We’ll partner with New Zealand companies already producing these high-quality products, and package them to satisfy a high-end market.”
FT-Jul16
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