17 October 2021
Special Delivery
Rakahinonga. Entrepreneur.
writer: Carly Thomas
photographer: helen lea wall
Middlehurst Delivered.
For the Macdonald sisters, the wild hills of their childhood provided the perfect launching pad for their business, Middlehurst Delivered. These days, working out of a converted garage in Rangiora, Sophie and Lucy are busy showing just how well a family business can succeed with a bit of creative thinking.
When Lucy and Sophie Macdonald were kids, Tuesdays were town days. Growing up on Middlehurst Station meant their childhood playground spanned the mighty Kaikōura Ranges – snow-capped in winter, wide and sparse in summer, always changing beneath the big skies and rolling clouds. Getting to head into town, with all its hustle and bustle, was a real treat. “I remember begging Mum and Dad to move us to town,” says Sophie, 28, laughing. “It’s only when you get older that you realise what you had. This place is incredible, and I appreciate it now.”
Although both sisters now live in town, with Sophie in Rangiora and Lucy in Waipara, they make the long trek back to the upper reaches of Marlborough’s Awatere Valley as often as possible. The drive takes nearly eight hours but returning to their parents’ remote high country run of 16,550 hectares is worth it. These days, that’s the treat.
It's Anzac weekend, and the sisters are back at Middlehurst to spend some time with their folks, Susan and Willie. Tomorrow, their two siblings, Skye and Henry, will arrive too. "It always feels good to be here," says Lucy, 24, as she waves to Sophie's two-year-old daughter, Ruby, who's heading off with her grandmother to feed the chickens. "And it's so nice for Ruby to be here and have some of this in her childhood too."
This is a family that does things together. As well as being sisters, Lucy and Sophie are also business partners and their company, Middlehurst Delivered, ships the family's merino-lamb produce directly to buyers across the country. "We want people to know where their food has come from," Sophie explains. "It's that connection to the land, knowing that what you are eating has come from a place where the animals have lived really well."
As Sophie's talking, Lucy's nodding emphatically, then picks right up where her sister left off: "And cutting out the middleman, while also giving customers the opportunity to know the story behind their food."
The sisters' extraordinary childhood and the pristine hills they grew up in are right at the heart of the Middlehurst Delivered story. "It is amazing what Mum and Dad have done here," Lucy says. "We know there is room on the farm, as a business, for us all to be involved, and they are really supportive of what we are doing."
The route to establishing the business, though, was almost as winding as the drive out to the station itself. When the family first sat down to discuss succession, Lucy and Sophie made it clear that, while they definitely wanted to be involved, they didn't want to work directly on farm - a statement they still make emphatically. "Having that talk about succession helped us think a little more broadly as to what we could do to be a part of it all," Lucy says.
The sisters realised that they'd have to do it their own way, and last year's Covid-19 lockdown provided the perfect brainstorming conditions. "We would start throwing these grand ideas around," says Sophie, "but then we would bring it back to making it as simple and basic as we could so we could actually get something off the ground. Once you have something started, then you can build on it and do other things. The actual starting is the hard bit."
Their long chats soon grew into a tangible idea that finally became a solid business plan, and Middlehurst Delivered was born. After that, things began to take shape quickly, with each sister utilising her individual strengths. When it came to gaining compliance and logistics, it was Sophie who took charge. "I worked for Sounds Air for about ten years, and started as ground crew to eventually taking on an operations role," she explains. "I was so appreciative of my aviation background, because it's highly regulated and it prepared me for that side of things when it came to starting our business. I definitely got us way over-prepared."
"Thank goodness for Sophie!" says Lucy. "I'm way more cruisey than she is, and I need her when it comes to all the technical stuff. Sophie will analyse where it could go wrong, and I just think it will go great. That's why we work well together."
"I prepared for doomsday!" confirms Sophie. "But Lucy was way more optimistic. She was so sure that it would all work."
And it has.
After getting all the compliance boxes ticked, Sophie and Lucy put the rest of their plan into action: they tied in the family's finishing-off block in Cheviot, then created a website and came up with a streamlined delivery system. The sisters now work out of Sophie's converted garage in Rangiora, and there are already signs of the business carrying on to the next generation - it's apparently Ruby's favourite place to be. "Ruby likes to tell us, 'I'm going to work now,'" says Lucy, chuckling.
The beauty of their business lies in its simplicity: the focus is on top-quality merino lamb, full stop. "We pulled it back to a whole sheep and half a sheep, and that was our starting point," says Lucy. "It's nose-to-tail, so it includes things like spare ribs that people don't usually get. People may not have cooked cuts like ours before, but they get the box and they love trying something different. Our cuts are all modern and quite innovative."
The girls grew up with cuts like the knuckle and the shank, and Sophie is quick to point out that lamb ribs are "a hidden treasure". The taste of the meat itself is also a special feature. "The flavour of merino lamb is a bit more mild, a bit more delicate, with a finer texture and a little less fatty," Sophie explains. "It can be mind-blowing the difference in taste between supermarket lamb and lamb like ours. I remember going to uni and going to the supermarket and being like, 'Okay, what is this?'"
One thing the sisters hope to show people through their business is that there is another, more sustainable way to eat meat. As Sophie points out, there can be a lot of negativity towards consuming meat, but she wants people to know that there are also "some really positive things happening".
"We are making the lamb go further," Lucy says. "We are using more of it and, as we head towards a more sustainable future, that will make a difference." Their packaging is made from wool, and in order to keep it out of landfill they encourage customers to either reuse it or save it up and send it back. "Doing things in this way is important to us," explains Lucy. "Mum and Dad have worked so hard to build up what is here at Middlehurst, and we want to look after that too."
By this time, Ruby and her grandmother have returned from feeding the chooks, and someone's busy cooking dinner. The smell of sizzling lamb cutlets wafts on the cool evening air, promising a taste of the hills and home, and calling the family to the table. Sophie glances outside, where the shadows are deepening. "You can never get sick of looking at these hills," she says. "They are always changing." This grand view, in all its expansive remoteness, has given the sisters a special outlook on life, one infused with optimism for the future.
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