Trusted supplements firm marks centenary

The New Zealand-owned business which sells in excess of 380 products and blends, plus more than 2000 customised formulations for specific farmers celebrated the milestone this month.

Managing director Tony Manning says longevity in the market reflects the trust secured among famers.

“We have been here so long, our products and quality have stood the test of time and have added value to farming businesses – that’s a great feeling,” he told Dairy News.

The business was founded by a Danish chemist in 1915, with the name Danish Mineral Research Company. Three years later it was bought by the McNeill family, who retained the ownership for three generations and in 1985 its name was changed to Nutritech International Ltd.

In 2010 the McNeills sold the business to the management. Manning is the managing director and served as general manager before the management takeover.

Nutritech remains “a truly family-owned business,” Manning says. “Having all the shareholders as employees and contractors is quite exciting”.

The company started as a supplier of mineral mixes mostly to sheep and beef farmers across New Zealand; today 70% of its products are sold to dairy farmers. 

“As the dairy industry evolved our focus became predominantly dairy based. It requires a scientific approach that adds value to this developing sector. However we continue to supply time tested free-access DanMix minerals for sheep and beef farms. The company also sells their long trusted mineral premixes for horse, rabbit, sheep, deer, goat, poultry and pigs.” A large proportion of your business is also with silage inoculants through contractors and also maize seed. 

Nutritech, for 94 years sold its products directly to farmers, a strategy that provided its own challenges. 

“That was essentially in direct opposition to our rural resellers and vets. We have worked hard to change this strategy and now work closely with our rural retailer and vet partners to provide solutions to our farmer customers.

Manning admits Nutritech “needed to change” In previous years “we were not customer-focused, we were product-focused. The customer has to be at the centre of everything we do; only this will see us deliver on our positioning statement – as the ‘leaders in animal nutrition’.”

It has been fun evolving the business, he says.

“When we took over we worked in quite a small warehouse in Mount Wellington Auckland and Tuam St in Christchurch; our current building in Auckland is two-and-a-half times the size of that and we are now starting to question capacity here and our Rolleston facility is twice the size of our previous facility we were prior to the earthquake”

Nutritech is continuing to upgrade; new machinery will go online later this month.

Manning says Nutritech must continue to add value and provide nutritional solutions to farming businesses. “If we can’t, you don’t survive.”

“We are an animal nutrition company; we don’t make feed, we don’t sell feed, we produce ingredients that go into the feed. Our customers are the ones who make the feed and we support them in the field.”