pioneering spirit/the well-preserved ∫arkers
Fruits
of
their labours
It began in a disused cowshed on a corner of the
family farm and today is the biggest employer in
town. One of New Zealand’s finest family businesses
is 40 years old and still going strong
wo r d s k at e c o u g h l a n
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P H OTO G R A P H s g u y f r e d e r i c k
How to stay in business as a
family for 40 years
Michael Barker says:
Governance is utterly critical to
sur vival. Without strict repor ting
requirements we would not be in
business today.
The best thing my father did was set
up a strong independent board to
whom I am answerable. The board
employs me, can fire me and sets
my salar y. If my sisters, who are
shareholders, have queries about
how the company is run, then they
approach the board. So I am a
board member, a shareholder and
an employee.
Requirements for surviving:
innovation, quality, trust,
diversification and perspiration.
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Michael and wife Brigitte
have three daughters,
Alice, Libby and Genevieve,
and live near the factory
in Pleasant Valley. The
remainder of the family farm
has been sold as it was too
small to be economic.
What would Michael have
done if he hadn’t gone into
the family firm? ”I have no
idea now. Sometimes I feel
like one of those women
married to a powerful man
who really might have quite
a strong brain of her own
but who has always been
overshadowed. I have been
married to Barker’s.”
GERALDINE IS A SMALL and picturesque South Canterbury
town with an English feel to its Christmas-card houses and
treed gardens. It has just 3000 residents. A few kilometres out
of town is a valley so pleasant it is known by that very name.
If one was to be pottering about Pleasant Valley’s pretty roads
of a morning, admiring the sculptured Four Peaks foothills of
the Southern Alps, one might take fright at a stream of 100 cars
turning into an unremarkable gate in the corner of a paddock.
What are all these people doing here – out in the country?
A curious investigator would first notice a haphazard
parking habit with cars strewn under trees, along hedgerows
and beside a collection of disparate buildings, some big and
some small, one that was surely the old homestead and others a
jumble of factory-like structures.
Nostrils would then begin to twitch. What is that smell?
A drift of hot, jammy air floats across the paddock, bringing
Grandma’s kitchen instantly to mind. Here’s the old aluminium
pan with towering piles of raspberries and avalanches of white
sugar being gently stirred with a long wooden spoon. Soon it
begins to plop and smell delicious.
Nostrils quiver again as a slight morning breeze delivers
another clue, this time the tart aroma of fresh tomatoes and
onions being heated with spices and vinegar. That’s chutney
for sure … or is it? Perhaps it’s a pan of simmering Indian
spices ready to delight any tandoori chicken it should meet
on a plate.
But out here, in the backblocks of Geraldine? Inside every one
of those buildings are teams of experts feverishly stirring the
jam, spicing the chutney, simmering the sauces and crushing the
fruit. They are food technologists, factory workers, marketers,
accountants and engineers. For 40 years the Barker family of
Geraldine has been up to its elbows in preserving pans, turning
local fruits into juices, chutneys and jams or, in their early days,
fermenting local hedgerow fruit into wines and liqueurs.
THE FACTS
1000 tonnes of New Zealand fruit processed
every year.
120 staff at the Pleasant Valley site.
30 fur ther staff throughout New Zealand
and Australia.
400 different products.
Three brands:
Barker’s of Geraldine; makers of juices, jams
and chutneys made with minimal heat treatment
to preserve the goodness of the fruit
Anathoth; jam and chutney makers whose
products “taste just like Grandma made” and
which Barker’s purchased almost three years ago
Tandoori Palace; a range of top-quality
simmer sauces manufactured by Barker’s for a
Christchurch-based family-owned restaurant
business with whom Barker’s has a joint venture.
Plus commercial supplies to bakers and ice
cream and yoghur t manufacturers.
t
What started out in the cowshed on a corner of the family
farm is today big business by any standards. By Geraldine’s
it is the employer of five percent of the entire population. It
draws 60,000 tourists a year into the Barker’s shop in the town’s
tourist precinct.
In the fruit juice syrup, jam and chutney aisles of the
nation’s supermarkets Barker’s of Geraldine (along with its
recently acquired Anathoth brand) is now the second-biggest
manufacturer in each of those categories. In the blackcurrant
syrup category it is number one. Of this they are particularly
proud as their juice is 48 percent pure “squeezed” blackcurrant
juice while competitor Ribena is bottled offshore with only 20.8
percent juice. This is a significant achievement for the familyowned business, given that its supermarket competitors in this
category are owned by multinationals Coca-Cola (Baker Halls,
Roses, Schweppes) and GlaxoSmithKline (Ribena).
How did all this happen? Michael Barker, 50ish, is the modest
and somewhat shy boss of the family firm who returned home
30 years ago after graduating from Lincoln College (as it was
then) with a horticultural science degree and a desire to make
wine. He found the family firm was in a serious pickle and felt
he had no option but to get to work trying to save it.
Michael’s father was the legendary inventor Anthony Barker,
a farmer who loved to make things and who’d become famous
for the wine he made in a cowshed from wild elderberries that
were rampant in the local hedges. “Once Dad got started there
was no stopping him,” says Michael. “The winery was in the
shed, the vats had been road culverts; he modified vacuum
cleaners and washing machines to make whatever he needed
and he made wine from about 20 different fruits.
“It was innovative at the time and exciting and Barker’s
got written up in many newspapers and magazines around
the country. Dad was considered a bit of an eccentric inventor
perhaps but he made good products and people liked that.
NZ Life & Leisure 103
How a snowstorm ignited a fruitful relationship
The late Anthony Barker, farmer and
founder of Barker’s of Geraldine, was
a lifelong inventor as well as a pickler,
preser ver and fermenter of fruits. One
winter weekend he and his father, uncle
and a neighbour set off for a fishing trip
to Harrison’s Bight on Lake Heron near
the Southern Alps in the Ashbur ton
headwaters. A snowstorm trapped them
in their canvas tent where, due to the
perishing cold and hunger alleviated only
by smoked fish, they might have died if not
for Anthony’s inventiveness.
He found an empty oil drum near the
camp-site and devised a makeshift firebox
with chimney which they set up at the
end of their tent. Watching the fire while
waiting out the storm, Anthony planned
ways to make it produce more heat.
Several decades later, prompted by a
chimney fire, he fiddled fur ther by welding
baffles inside a fire drum and adding
a glass door before installing it in the
farmhouse where it emitted good heat but
exasperating amounts of smoke and soot.
Improvements were made and a modified
Puffing Billy was also installed in the shop/
showroom where Anthony’s home-made
elderberry and strawberry wines and fruit
liqueurs were finding a ready market.
Into the shop one day came a pair of
executives from multinational Shell Oil’s
subsidiary Kent Heating. They parked their
chilled butts beside the Puffing Billy and
tasted Anthony’s renowned elderberry
wine. They had been tasked with finding
suitable heating systems into which Shell
Oil could diversify, using wood. As their
butts thawed and the elderberry wine hit
the mark, they realized they’d stumbled
across something. This ”something”
eventually became something of
international significance. The Kent-Barker
log fire went into production in 1978 and,
with Anthony retaining patent ownership,
continued to provide royalties of $2 a fire
for many years thereafter.
The timing of the firebox deal was crucial
to Barker’s early survival as just a few
years earlier the winery bulk store had
burned down. Anthony later said that
without the firebox money, Barker’s might
have gone under.
“Mum [Gillian Barker] was the saleswoman who, every
time there was a new product to be sold, would ring up all her
old school friends who were by then living up and down the
country and ask them to go out and sell it.”
That was in 1980. The turnover of $93,579 returned a loss
of $12,632 despite the total wages for Michael’s parents being
a meagre $2400. “It wasn’t what you’d call organized. I was too
busy trying to pick up the pieces to have a strategic oversight.
I was thinking ‘Shit, what’s going to happen next?’ so I started
trying to create markets for the products Dad was making. But
the business really was in trouble so I went to my university
lecturer in marketing [Michael Mellon] and said ‘You are
always showing us case studies; well, I have a real case study for
you’. He agreed to come and help refocus the business.”
The new strategy revolved around blackcurrants, the then
“new gold” of the Canterbury horticultural scene. The two
Michaels proceeded with what, in hindsight, appears fearlessly
bold: a plan to build a new plant to launch the world’s only
pure and natural blackcurrant juice. “We took a huge risk and
borrowed a whole lot of money. We never did anything other
than work because we had to make it work because we were so
committed. When you are young you go for it because you’re
not as aware of the risks. Now I look back and wonder how I
was so brave.”
Blackcurrant juice became, and remains today, Barker’s core
product, outliving an aggressive imitation from Baker Halls
(a brand now owned by Coca-Cola) and the reversal of sales
which befell competitor Ribena when schoolgirls publicized
the misleading nature of its claims about vitamin C content.
(Barker’s blackcurrant syrup can claim a high vitamin C content
due to its being almost 50 percent pure juice.) “In a way this
product, the blackcurrant juice, is typical of what Barker’s is
really about – it is too good. We put out a vastly better product
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“The real heroes and heroines of the Barker’s story are the staff,” says
Michael. “Long service is the norm here. At our 40th birthday party we
recognized 37 current staff who had worked with us for over 10 years.”
Twice a day a truck and trailer unit, jammed to the roof with jams,
chutneys, simmer sauces, fruit fillings, nectars and juices, leaves Barker’s
South Canterbury storage facility to distribute the Barker’s-owned
Anathoth brand as well as the Barker’s of Geraldine products and the
joint-venture Tandoori Palace range of premium Indian simmer sauces
nationally and to Australia for some products.
than Ribena and there is no money in that. We’re hell of a proud
of what we produce,” says Michael “but we’ve always reinvested
and never seem to make any money. In fact, this has been one
of our challenges; we always want to make the best products we
can and we’ve focused on quality rather than profit. But that’s
how we do things…”
Nowadays, Barker’s of Geraldine (as the company is known,
following a tweak in branding to reinforce its pure New
Zealand fruit and family heritage) focuses on making fine fruit
products and having happy customers just as Michael’s parents
did four decades ago. However, the big market breakthrough in
recent years has been into the commercial world and now, just
as important as the consumers at the supermarket jam shelf,
are the commercial bakers and ice cream and yoghurt makers
who represent nearly half of today’s turnover. Each year many
tonnes of fruit are processed for commercial clients to use
in biscuits, pies, flans, cakes, slices, ice creams and yoghurts.
There’s also a range of non-fruit fillings such as caramel, custard
and chocolate.
“Hopefully, these days we are a bit more on to it and create
products that the market wants or, better still, solve problems
for our customers,” says Michael. “In fact we are feeling hopeful
at this stage that we have a good future for the business. Our
marketing approach is professional and rather than randomly
launch products that we think are good into the market, we
are more disciplined. So finally, after all these years – yes, I am
quite optimistic that Barker’s is really going somewhere.”
And where is that “somewhere”? “Australia. Do you know that
Australia does not have a premium jam range?” Michael says
with the excitement of a man with 20 million-plus potential jam
eaters in his sights. “Australian consumers have forgotten what
real jam tastes like. They taste Anathoths and their response is:
‘Wow, we did not know that jam could taste this good’.”
“We’re hell of a proud of what we
produce but we’ve always reinvested
and never seem to make any money”
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