Pro Features

Zeelandt Brewery – connecting the old and new

It doesn’t get much more Kiwi than this: a brewery run out of a large steel shed just off the Napier–Taupo highway. There’s even a Kingswood ute parked outside. But on closer inspection, there’s also a strong European vibe at Zeelandt Brewery in Eskdale. Zeelandt is the Dutch province New Zealand is named after and founder Chris Barber says he...

Business Hub turns 3

The Hawke’s Bay Business Hub is maturing into a busy and vibrant resource that’s being well utilised by the local business community. 2018 marks the third birthday of Hawke’s Bay Business Hub. The Hub, as it’s more commonly known, is a key initiative of Business Hawke’s Bay, the business-led economic development agency with a region-wide focus, devoted to creating the...

Project a winner for business and charity

It’s a fundraising mission with a difference: fitting out an aging 40-foot container to give it a new lease on life. Repurposing the large, blue shipping container into a multipurpose, habitable and consented transportable building is a major task for the small team at Architecture & Interiors Ltd. Once the months-long ‘Life Box’ project is complete, the container will be...

Boxing clever: building a business out of a shipping container

From coffee outlets to homes and offices, container buildings are springing up all over Hawke’s Bay. What’s driving this trend and what are the advantages of doing business out of a metal box? It started in 2011 when Al Borrie opened 'The Box’ – a modified shipping container transformed into a coffee outlet in Clive. Another container café – Tamara...

Tumu Timbers – nailing its market

Pallets and bins may look simple to build but for one of New Zealand‘s largest manufacturers, Tumu Timbers, there’s a level of sophistication that’s getting the best from what others would regard as the off-cuts. Tumu Timbers, based in Irongate Maraekakaho, has been supplying a range of pallets, bins, wooden packaging and timber products to a wide range of industries...

Irongate Industrial Zone – Opening the gate to development

Irongate, south of Hastings, has long been earmarked as a “dry industries” hub and as the regional economy continues to boom, that vision is finally being realised. Head south out of Hastings along Maraekakaho Road and just outside the city limits you hit a busy industrial patchwork of large and small businesses – some old, some new – sprinkled between...

New Zealand’s Apple Industry Leads the World Four Years Running

The World Apple Review has for the fourth year running named New Zealand’s apple industry the most competitive on the global stage, against 33 major apple growing countries. Released this week by Belrose Inc, the US based world fruit market analysts, the World Apple Review, stated that the innovations emerging from New Zealand’s apple industry will increasingly impact production and...

A brewpub where you’re spoilt for choice

Much has changed in the world of beer appreciation over the three decades Jeremy Bayliss has been running pubs in Hawke’s Bay. He recalls that in the early 1990s, when he was managing Napier’s Criterion Hotel, beer drinkers weren’t exactly spoilt for choice. So it was a big deal, for example, when Steinlager launched a second label and punters suddenly...

Direction Focused

“Stay focused on your direction, and don’t get too hung up on specifics,” is the advice one of Hawke’s Bay’s most experienced farming leaders has for the future generation when goal setting. Sam Robinson, who is this year’s recipient of the Laurie Dowling Memorial Award for services to agriculture, is now spending more of his time mentoring and sharing his...

From Delivery Boy to HB Farmer of the Year

At the age of 12, Hawke's Bay's 2018 Farmer of the Year David Danks had a fated encounter that would one day come true, leading him to earn the prestigious award. Collecting money for his milk and paper runs in Westshore, he called on a house, where the lady asked him what he wanted to do when he grew up....