New Product! Pure New Zealand Sheep Milk

Following the excitement of our Country Calendar episode we were stoked to bring out a brand new product the very next week.

Pure New Zealand Sheep Milk – with nothing added and nothing taken away from this beautifully creamy, natural milk.

We were exceptionally proud of this product. Not only for its great natural taste and nutritional goodness, but also because it represents a new step forward for us in terms of what we hope to achieve. The label also looked fantastic, and continued on with our theme, representing our key values of working together with the animals and the land to produce high quality products in a sustainable and ethical way. It was also such a good feeling to be able to finally have this great product available to kiwis, especially for those who had been waiting patiently for it for a long time.

Now, our focus is on making sure that whole sheep milk is available in all regions of New Zealand, so watch this space…

What an amazing experience! 550,000 kiwis across New Zealand tuned in to watch and learn about what our family is all about. We were certainly humbled, especially once we were told that it was one of the most viewed episodes Country Calendar has had to date. 

The Country Calendar team spent the best part of a week at the farm, interviewing us and filming the various things that we do, including milking the sheep, working with our farm dogs, processing the sheep milk, and even shearing our new flock of cashmere goats. Being in front of the camera definitely wasn’t a natural thing for us, but luckily we got used to it after several (probably hundreds) of takes. The film crew definitely knew what they were doing anyway, as they made the whole experience super easy for us – thankfully.

The nationwide screening was also our first chance to see the end result so it was certainly an exciting day! It was, admittedly, quite odd seeing ourselves on the TV, but also very cool at the same time. And the response from everyone who saw it was incredible! We received so many kind messages congratulating us on what we were doing and wishing us luck for our journey ahead. Not to mention the number of people who told us that they were super keen to give sheep milk a try. The entire experience was incredibly encouraging, and gave us even more motivation to stick with it.   

Celia, Nigel and Dave and the rest of the Country Calendar team did a superb job! Especially considering they had a fairly camera shy bunch to deal with. We don’t think they could have showcased our day-to-day farm/business life, while also portraying our core beliefs and values, any better than the way they did with this story – we can’t thank them enough! 

This is only the beginning though. We have many exciting chapters to come, with great visions of where we would like to go next and into the future. And we can’t wait to bring you all along with us on this journey! 

If you missed the initial screening, you can still view the episode here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ax1od14fCjA 

After a bit of thought and feedback we received in the early months of our new product launch we decided that our initial labels didn’t quite represent us and what we were about. Plus, the name “Performance Protein” tended to detract from what our products actually were – a beautiful full sheep milk drink with only a few natural ingredients added to give them their unique chocolate, vanilla and coffee flavours, that is also naturally high in protein calcium and a whole host of other nutrients. We found that the name made some people feel like it wasn’t for them, and that protein had been added rather than it being all natural.

Long story-short, hindsight is a beautiful thing and you can’t always know these things until you give them a try. So we went to work on creating a brand new label which represented us, our family and where we come from; our farm, which has given us so much pride and joy; and the amazing animals that we get to work with every single day. After a lot of brainstorming, tweaking and backwards and forwards with our label designer, we finally arrived at our final designs which we were all stoked with. These new labels hit the shelves mid-August and people loved them!

For those of you who travel with AirNZ regularly I’m sure you would have come across their in-flight Kia Ora magazine which does a great job of sharing stories about a lot of local people and businesses, as well as covering a lot of our great tourist hot-spots around the country. We certainly have a look through it whenever we’re flying, and that was especially true in July when we were lucky enough to have a 3 page article written about our family, farm and new sheep milk venture. It was such a well-written piece on us, and we were extremely grateful to be given such a cool feature. It certainly helped to increase our exposure to the rest of the country, particularly as we were still a very small, local and new venture at that point, but with some much drive and determination to grow and extend our reach throughout the country.

Despite not being that far into our new venture, we decided to enter our tasty drinks into the Outstanding NZ Food Producer Awards. It was such a cool event to be apart of and it was super interesting to see all of the new and innovative products being produced around the country. 

Our new sheep milk drinks did exceptionally well too, coming away with Silver and two Bronze awards for our Vanilla, Choc and Coffee flavours in the Dairy category, respectively.

Here’s a link to the Awards website to see what it’s about: https://outstandingfoodproducer.co.nz/ 

After a couple of months of screwing thousands of bottle caps onto the bottles by hand we were all super stoked when our new bottler and capper machine arrived to New Zealand after travelling all of the way from South Africa! This machine was now going to both fill the bottles and then screw the lids on them meaning that all we had to do was put the empty bottles on and then take the filled and capped bottles off – how good!

Of course it couldn’t work smoothly for us from the word go though… Unfortunately, there were a few hiccups with the machine from when it was installed, and since this machine replaced our temporary bottle filler, we now had to come up with a quick solution in the meantime so that we could continue on and not waste any product. So with a bit of thinking on our toes and a quick trip to Moore Wilson’s in Masterton we came up with our own production line. It did mean that we had to both fill and cap every single bottle by hand, but it was the best that we could do until our beloved machine was fixed – All hands on deck for the next couple of weeks!

February was an exciting month as we finally managed to tick off all of the documents necessary to be able to sell our products in the New World supermarkets. New World Thordon, in Wellington, were super keen to give our products a go in their store, so that’s where we got into first – arguably one of the busiest stores in the country, so we were stoked! 

Over the next few weeks we slowly found our way into a few more New World stores including Masterton, Palmerston North Melody’s and Wellington City New Worlds, plus we increased our presence in more local Masterton stores, as well as a couple of spots in Palmerston North including Cafe Cuba and Steve’s Wholefoods store, and finally into Moore Wilson’s in Central Wellington.

With our milking shed now fully completed, as well as having all of our processing equipment in place for the pasteurisation and bottling of our products at Kingsmeade, we decided it was time to go full steam ahead – no turning back now. Into full production we went.

It was super exciting to get into the swing of things, and most importantly to be able to share our great products with our friends, family and the wider community. We started at a very small scale milking around 150 ewes and only producing about 125L worth of milk per flavour (choc, vanilla & coffee) and we were processing just one flavour every 3 days. Despite the small start though, we were determined to expand our reach as soon as we could so that every New Zealander would have a chance to try it for themselves – that was a key aim for us at this point.

Initially, without yet having a specific market to sell to, we did a lot of giveaways and promotions, especially at local sports events including community fun runs and summer sport tournaments as we began building our brand. We knew people would love what we were doing, it was now just a matter of getting ourselves out there. Slowly, but surely, we got our products into a lot of local cafes and stores, including The Old Bakehouse and Landsdown Sammies, and sold the odd box of 12 to friends and new sheep milk fans from around the wider region. Getting into the main supermarket chains was our next step though, but we soon realised that was going to take some time, plus just a little bit of paperwork…

A lot happened in this month, but most notably was our first ever full product run! Our first complete trial of the entire process.

Early in the month, and after some delays, all of our processing equipment, including a temporary bottle filler, was fitted into Kingsmeade’s cheese factory, meaning that we were finally good to go on the processing front.

At about the same time our label designs were also completed which meant that we could now label our bottles with our brand, a bit about us, and all of the important nutritional information. It was certainly exciting to watch the labels go onto the bottles for the first time, using our new labeller as well.

Now that we were finally ready to go, we did our first complete product run of all 3 flavours – what a day!! It was incredible to finally have our finished product, and now be able to share it with everyone. Such an uplifting time, but still a long way to go yet, as this was just a practice. But we were now ready to confidently get into full production when the time came.

An additional little win for this month was a nice little feature in the Country Wide magazine – news of what we were getting up to was spreading fast.

Things became very real when all of a sudden these massive, deep holes were drilled into the ground for the large posts that were about to become the foundation for our new sheep milking shed. 

The architect’s plans were finalised and consent was given, giving us the go-ahead, and so the tradies got to work on our new investment – an important next step in our venture. It was pretty awesome to see it all unfold, from the foundations being set, to the walls going up, the roof being laid and finally the milking system being added in to polish off our masterpiece. 

We were now ready to go on the milking front!

Check out how our shed got put together here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I6MT24WlFf4&t=50s