MEET YOUR {OUTSTANDING} MAKER, OPITO BAY SALT CO
Optio Bay Salt Co. combines sunshine, pristine Coromandel salt water and patience to create award-winning salt. The artisan salt producer broke into the Outstanding NZ Food Producer Awards in 2022 when they were named Emerging Business and were awarded five medals; including two Gold Medals for Opito Bay Salt Co, Natural Sea Salt and Opito Bay Salt Co, Rosemary Sea Salt.
“ I couldn’t believe it, we were blown away by the ONZFPA medal, and then we were lucky enough to be voted top emerging producer...On the night, we were absolutely humbled.”
Like the start of any good story, business owner Perry’s idea began with a bottle of red wine and a sense of curiosity he couldn’t ignore. Perry and his partner Erin, both of who have always been foodies, had recently become fascinated with Himalayan salt and its properties. After a few drinks and discussions about the product, they decide to try their luck and create some themselves at home.
Fast forward a couple of years, and they’ve found spades of success with their company, Opito Bay Salt Co, based in Coromandel.
After conducting a few salt making experiments from the comfort of their home in Grey Lynn (some of which ended up in the neighbours back yard) Perry and Erin decided to run with their idea and ambition, moving their salt making project to the back of their property in Opito Bay, a pristine and beautiful beachside town on the Coromandel.
“We decided to build a treehouse at the back of our property in Opito Bay around the time of lockdown, and after that, we decided to do up the house and start making salt,” recalls Perry. After completing a series of test runs, once lockdown was over, Perry decided it was time to see how successful this salt making project could become and began selling the salts at Coromandel markets. After receiving positive feedback from the community, Perry ramped up production to see how far he could take this newfound opportunity.
When it came to getting production started up, Perry experienced a series of challenges getting things moving. “Getting yourself off the ground is one thing, anyone who has a business knows that! Luckily, we had been through that before with other start-ups, but this time the major challenge was working with environment,” he explains. “We had originally started off doing everything in containers off the beach and that was challenging because you have to go out into the weather, in winter, it’s hard”. Perry said the initial production process required carrying 20 litre containers of salt water from the beach, putting them on a truck, then transporting them back up to the house for production. Having to do this multiple times over is physically demanding, especially for a small scale start-up. “Now, we have a pump to help us allowing us to use bigger water containers with machinery pumping out the salt water. We’ve gone through a few of those,” he laughs.
Logistics aside, Perry describes the environment as ‘challenging,’ with the weather often being the major dictating factor dictating how much production can occur. “At the moment, we’re building greenhouses with high winds, we have 40 knot winds coming in and rain swells, so we can’t harvest when the swells are that high, and we don’t harvest after rain to ensure the product is fresh,” he says.
Sustainability is a core value for Opito Bay Salt Co. Since founding the business, Perry has implemented a wide range of initiatives to ensure the production and distribution of the salt is environmentally friendly and doesn’t leave carbon footprint. “Opito Bay is a very special place, it’s spectacular, if you live here you want it to be clean, so sustainability is important to us,” he says. While planning his business idea, creating something that wasn’t going to impact the environment was at the forefront of Perry’s focus. “The by-product of the salt is H2O, so our footprint is nil, and we use electric pumps to move water so we minimise the use of carbon fuels, and our packaging is also fully compostable,” he says.
Another focus for Perry is redefining how salt is used in food. Opito Bay Salt Co produces a variety of flavoured salts, ranging from regular Himalayan salt which can be used as a finishing salt, through to smoked chilli, which gives food a smoky flavour. There is even Furikake flavoured salt, which draws upon flavours found in Asian cuisine and gives dishes a meaty flavour. All Opito Bay salt is more coarse and dense than regular salt, emphasising how natural and whole Perry’s products are. “There is good salt and bad salt, and it’s about the mineralogy of it. Salt has been used unconsciously in the Western world,” explains Perry. “We don’t try refine it, it’s nice to have that naturalness in the salt, it’s to add that extra flavour and that’s what makes an amazing product. It’s how you get the best out of the food you’re cooking”.
Perry says that winning an Outstanding New Zealand Food Producer award was incredible. “I couldn’t believe it, we were blown away by the ONZFPA medal, and then we were lucky enough to be voted top emerging producer which meant a lot” he says. “On the night, we were absolutely humbled”.
