Client Q&A: Country Culinaire

Trish Gibson of Country Culinaire is taking an innovative approach to improving the company's operation.

Describe your business.

Country Culinaire is an owner-operated award-winning frozen dessert manufacturer producing packaged, high-end desserts such as pavlova roulades and sticky date puddings selling to retail supermarkets, upmarket food outlets and caterers. We recently began producing our own highly sought-after specialty icecreams.

Our operation, which is based in Hastings, began in 2000 and currently employs eight staff.

What was the reason you decided to invest in R&D?

To expand and grow, Country Culinaire must develop an export market. We realised we needed to get involved in R&D and to take an innovative approach to improving our operation.

Our goal is to increase process efficiency, productivity and throughput by introducing appropriate high-end technologies to our operation. Some stages in our process are continually inhibiting staff from speedily and efficiently producing product.

What barriers did you face and how did you overcome them?

We are a small company and as such have no R&D capability or time to understand the intricacies of process research and development and funding. Through our association with IRL and the Hawke‘s Bay Regional Technology Partner of the Ministry of Science and Innovation (MSI) we have found a lifeline and the support we need to move forward.

What R&D work are you undertaking at present?

Our company engaged IRL’s Engineering Innovation team to undertake a scoping study, supported by TechNZ funding, to focus on potential productivity improvements, which identified a number of opportunities to reduce bottlenecks, improve throughput and reduce operating costs, especially labour.

IRL then put a proposal to us to radically improve our processes. We used this to apply for an MSI Technology Transfer Voucher and are delighted to have been awarded Hawke‘s Bay’s first.

What outcomes do you hope to achieve?

Some equipment and processes we recently installed are not up to the task and need fully automating using IRL capability. Increasing throughput will enable Country Culinaire to increase volumes, help grow our export business and allow us to meet the competitive export market price points.

We have just dispatched our very first container to Australia and as a result of the work we are undertaking with IRL, Country Culinaire is looking to grow the export business to a container a month within two years.