You’ve heard the expression about life giving you lemons. For Ross Beaton and Sally Gallagher, life gave them apples, so they made apple juice!
Exporting apples since 1982, Ross had always been bothered by the fruit that was nutritionally sound and packed with flavour, but wasn’t ‘pretty’ enough for export and after pairing up with Sally Gallagher, The Apple Press was born.
Calling on The FoodBowl to support product development and scale-up, Sally and Ross have built a business from the ground up, quite literally. “Without The FoodBowl, we wouldn’t be here today with this product,” Sally says.
“How else could we have trialled the concept?”
The Apple Press now has a state-of-the-art beverage processing facility in Hawkes Bay and at last count, a team of 40. Despite the challenges of Covid, export revenue is already over taking that of the domestic business and they’re exporting into Australia, Japan, Taiwan, Hong Kong and China. Pretty impressive considering The Apple Press juice only hit the market in 2018.
A steady stream of new products hit the shelf regularly, ensuring there’s always an interesting new variety to pique consumers’ interest. “It’s so great to see a regional success story creating jobs and opportunities in Hawke’s Bay,” says NZFIN Business Development Manager Nicky Solomon, who is based in the region.
“The Network is really proud to have been a part of The Apple Press journey.”
With a plant capacity of 50 million bottles per year, we can expect to see plenty more exciting innovation from The Apple Press.
In fact, Sally and Ross have already teamed up with Morgan Maw of Bonnie Goods to produce New Zealand’s first homemade oat milk, which was launched in late 2021. Together Morgan and The Apple Press team, with the support of NZFIN, cracked the tricky challenge of making oat milk in New Zealand, from New Zealand oats.
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