It all started with a bagel four years ago. Well actually it started with the want to see wholesome products on the shelves of supermarkets – products that weren’t chock full of ingredients that chefs themselves haven’t even heard of. But bagels were the first thing to appear from the oven.
This passion for quality food is what kick started Good Honest Products founder, Steven Illenberger, into creating his first few products for supermarkets across Christchurch.
“When we started we were only ordering in a couple of bags of flour. Now we’re pretty much going through about three tonnes of flour a week.”
Processing this amount of flour requires a great deal of work which Good Honest Products are not shy of. In November last year they were announced as the 14th Fastest Growing Company in New Zealand on the Deloitte’s Fast 50 list, with a growth rate of 378.09 percent during the past three years.
They were also crowned the Fastest Growing Manufacturer in the Christchurch and Upper South Island category a few months earlier at a ceremony in Canterbury.
“It was an incredible achievement. For a tiny bakery in Christchurch that I didn’t even think anybody had heard of, to be 14th in the country is ridiculous! It was kind of mind blowing,” says Dawn Ballagh, the company’s ‘Queen of everything’.
Since starting out in 2012, the team at Good Honest Products has grown from 1.5 employees to around 23. They were first stocking Fresh Choice in Merivale and Raeward Fresh stores around the region with bagels, and now supply 250+ cafés and restaurants with breads, bagels and macarons, as well as running their own café from their base in Wigram.
“We have come a long way from the initial idea and that was just driven by demand,” explains Dawn. “I think we got six calls in one week at one point and we were just like ‘this is crazy! What’s happening’? And then we started and everything got thrown into the air, we’ve moved offices again… I think this is our sixth or seventh office now.”
Success for this bakery is simply down to service and product – not groundbreaking stuff, but if you’ve got the right formula then rapid growth is a sure thing.
Steven himself has been a chef for around 30 years and a baker for 13, while Dawn has been a chef for 20 years. With two people like this running a tight ship, it’s not difficult to understand why things have been, and continue to, work in their favour.
What their past experience means for the company is an understanding to what clients both want and need.
“We’re working on some products right now for Addington Raceway and we’re talking to them on the same level. We are asking them what they want to do, so we know exactly what they’re trying to create on the plate, whereas bakers are absolutely brilliant at baking bread, way better than I am, but they can’t see the end result so that’s where our experience comes in,” Steven says.
“It’s the way we like to eat… and it’s just a better quality product as well. You can really tell. When you put a supermarket loaf beside ours, it’s just completely different.”
– STEVEN ILLENBERGER, OWNER
Good, quality products
The products they sell to customers, from their own café to the goods being delivered to supermarkets, cafés and more across New Zealand on a daily basis, are all handmade and contain the best ingredients they can get their hands on. No nasty stuff, just pure quality.
“It’s the way we like to eat… and it’s just a better quality product as well. You can really tell. When you put a supermarket loaf beside ours, it’s just completely different.
“With our super grain loaf, all the ancient grains we use are super nutritious – chia, flaxseed, mullet rye, all of those things. Super foods are such grab words at the moment, but that’s what we eat. Our customers recognise that as well. They know that we’re not the cheapest on the market but you pay for what you get,” explains Dawn.
Secrets to success
Good Honest Products is Steven’s seventh business venture – not through failure though. He often gets easily bored so sells up and moves on, but this one has stuck. He claims it is the brand’s ability to move across different products that keeps him interested.
This time round he has also managed to maintain more control over his products. With some of his other businesses, clients dictated how they had to make things, but not this time around. The Good Honest Products stock range can be adapted to meet certain needs, but they refuse to add emulsifiers and preservatives to their goods – that’s just not how they do things and current clients respect that.
The contacts and relationships Steven has forged during the years have paid great dividends in his latest adventure with Good Honest Products. I have no doubt that the company ethos of, would you believe, honesty, also plays a massive part in their success.
From their own team right through to the clients and consumers, Good Honest Products promote communication and encourage an open dialogue because “we all make mistakes”.
Solid employee relationships
Given their growth rate and rapid expansion in such a short space of time, Steven puts a lot of emphasis on company culture. A positive and supportive work environment is essential.
“We try to support our staff like family. One of our main goals is to become a living wage company and we’ve only got three employees right now who are under that, but that’s the goal – to get their and everybody else’s wages in line with that. It’s important. I mean I know I certainly couldn’t live on $16 per hour!”
Steven’s team of 23 employees includes some key players who have worked with him in the past. Previous experience and an already existing relationship between himself and his staff has created a tight-knit team that runs like a “welloiled machine”.
Their bakery runs 24/7 meaning things are always on the go. Steven describes shift patterns as being broken into three parts: dayshift who take care of the café and supermarket products, the nightshift team who take care of the fresh bread, and then the packers and drivers who arrive at midnight and are on the road by 3am.
Steven is careful not to overload the work and will only take on three new customers per week to keep everything balanced. Dawn maintains that having worked with many members of staff before, the familiarity has helped processes and systems naturally fall into place.
The rapid growth may be making the treadmill run a little fast, but they both assure me it is “controlled growth”.
“We don’t see all of our staff all of the time, and they don’t see each other all of the time, so in order to get it down through everybody and get those systems in place, it’s just far easier to be super controlled,” Dawn says.
Going the extra mile
The theme of support runs right through the core of Good Honest Products. Given their tight relationships with clients and understanding exactly what someone needs, the team literally go the extra mile for customers.
“If somebody has had a crazy lunch and they’ve got nothing left for dinner, we’ll whizz out and take them some stuff because we have our café, so we have the flexibility with product to drop it into them. I was at a customer in 15 minutes after he had called with the issue, and we can’t always do it, but if we can then we will,” explains Dawn.
Close relationships and a driven personality throughout the company is what pushes them forward. Even though growth plans were already in the pipeline, after the Deloitte result, Steven and his team decided to ramp things up a little.
With some motivation from the team at Deloitte, they have formed an advisory board whose main aim over the next year or two is all about going further into supermarkets. Client connections have also brought export inquiries from China, a massive industry with ongoing potential for them to enter when they are ready.
“It’s huge,” explains Steven. “We’re working through that but it’s exciting as well that the possibility is there.” For a tiny bakery in Christchurch that no one had even heard of, they’re making waves in a very big pond and the future looks golden.
By Terri Cluckie
