RWNZ chief executive to step down
Rural Women New Zealand (RWNZ) chief executive Gabrielle O’Brien will step down at the end of June.
Boutique dairy, Lewis Road Creamery, says sales of its premium butter in the US have skyrocketed during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Lewis Road Creamery founder Peter Cullinane says with most Americans in some form of lockdown there has been an explosion in home cooking and butter sales have benefitted.
The company got its butter stock into the US market before the lockdown took effect there.
“At this stage the distribution in the US is still working and while there have been some disruptions, the food distribution system hasn’t fallen apart,” Cullinane told Dairy News.
“I don’t believe that we will have trouble getting more butter up to the US and our prediction is that demand for our product will continue to increase significantly,” he says.
Lewis Road Creamery has products in 700 stores across the US, forging a special relationship with supermarket chain WholeFoods, which specialises in selling organic and ‘natural’ products. WholeFoods is owned by Amazon and Cullinane says they are a perfect match for the products produced by his company.
“We are approved to sell in all WholeFoods stores, although at this stage we are not in all of them. We initially started off selling in California and Texas, but now we have coverage right across the US and with WholeFoods we have coverage right up in the north east of the US,” he says.
Back in NZ, Cullinane says their sales have not decreased as a result of Covid-19.
Its Jersey Milk remains one of the standout products. He says when it was announced that NZ was going into lockdown, his board has a special meeting to see how they might deal with the situation.
“When the lockdown was announced we took advantage of the Government’s wage subsidy because we thought sales were going to be 30% below normal. But this was not the case and we had great pleasure in returning that subsidy in full,” he says.
A vet is calling for all animals to be vaccinated against a new strain of leptospirosis (lepto) discovered on New Zealand dairy farms in recent years.
Two major red meat sector projects are getting up to a combined $1.7 million in funding from the New Zealand Meat Board (NZMB).
Angus Barr and Tara Dwyer of The Wandle, Lone Star Farms in Strath Taieri have been named the Regional Supreme Winners at the Otago Ballance Farm Environment Awards in Dunedin.
OPINION: The distress that the politicians and bureaucrats are causing to the people of Wairoa and the wider Tairāwhiti is unforgivable.
Dairy
Rural banker Rabobank is partnering with Food Rescue Kitchen on a new TV series which airs this weekend that aims to shine a light on the real and growing issues of food waste, food poverty and social isolation in New Zealand.