A Taste of Timaru – Charlotte

Your family were potato farmers before they were potato chip-makers? That’s right. I was brought up on the farm just outside of Timaru, where Dad’s been growing potatoes for forty-eight years now. I helped out from a young age, too, getting out there in the summer and winter holidays – whether it was standing on a harvester or helping load potatoes into the shed. Dad was the main supplier of potatoes to the local chip maker at the site here, until the Timaru plant was closed.

And that was the perfect opportunity to take over? Well Dad had always had this dream to make the end product. He voiced it to all of us and we were like, “Dad you’re mad, you’re meant to be retiring!” And the potato chip market was really cluttered. But he wanted to do it, so he bought this land and the buildings, and sourced machinery from the Netherlands.

How did you fit into that? I hadn’t wanted to be a farmer, and after I went off to boarding school, I trained as a physical education teacher and did that as a career for some years. At the time Dad bought, I was still teaching and had just my first child, and I would just come in and help out at the factory, learning different areas in the business. Then eventually I started working full time, so there could be someone from the family on site while Dad was on the farm. I had no idea how to run a potato chip factory. He said, “You’ll learn.” And I have!

Our production has just kept increasing since then. We were cutting chips five days a week, eight hours a day, and now we’re running twenty-four hours a day, four-and-a-half days a week.

Does being family-run affect how you do business? My brother James pretty much runs the farm now, and
he lives there with his family. My sister Kate is based in Christchurch, and she has interest in the business though she’s not working in it. And Dad drives the potatoes in every day. Being a family, it’s great because we can make quick decisions, and we all get along. We need to be able to communicate really closely, and we’re adult enough to be flexible and transparent. It means we can get product to market quickly.

How do you like to spend a day off with the kids? My kids are really sporty, so as a family our weekends are filled up with sports. But when we have a spare one, we try to go boating. We’re just so central here, so everywhere is easy to get to.