Business Opportunities Weblog

Foraging for Soda Ingredients in New Zealand

By on February 8, 2013 in Ideas

Arohadrinks

The Press NZ:

Run your eyes over this lot: elderflowers, rhubarb, gooseberries, rosehips. Get the picture?

If “old-fashioned” popped up, you’d be right – these were the flowers and the fruits your granny put to good use in her kitchen. Now, for Christchurch marketing entrepreneur Mark Dillon, these ingredients represent a business opportunity.

Five years ago Dillon was planning to import a range of ciders. As a brand manager in the liquor industry he had become aware of international interest in what he calls “nostalgic products” – that is, the old way of fruits grown at home and made at home into drinks and cordials.

In today’s celebrity-mad world, “foraging” is the latest must-do for a chef. The story usually plays out with a chef, a basket overflowing with picturesque ingredients (mushrooms, seaweed, weed-weeds), and a photographer.

Dillon has developed a business based on foraging for once well-known garden and wild ingredients, including one still widely regarded as the flower of a weed tree.

new zealand soda

Business Opportunities Weblog editor and publisher Dane Carlson lives in the Sierra Nevada mountains of California, just 15 miles from Yosemite National Park. He accidentally became a professional blogger in 2001. He has added 12,203 posts to the site.

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