All for the love of yoghurt

How do you go from making a few jars of coconut yoghurt in your kitchen for your recently diagnosed dairy-intolerant partner to making enough for a whole town in two weeks?

It all started by accident. Tesh Randall had just found out her partner, Seb Walter, was dairy intolerant. This might not have been a big deal for a couple who didn’t eat yoghurt every morning for breakfast. But, it was a big deal for Tesh and Seb, who did. 

“We were eating quite a lot of dairy at the time, ice cream, yoghurt, cheese and everything so it was quite a dramatic thing to cut it out. We really didn’t want to give up all these things and the thing we really didn’t want to give up was yoghurt,” Tesh said. 

“It was our favourite thing to have for breakfast every morning, so I had a look online for recipes and played around at home with different ingredients to make some yummy yoghurt and eventually I made what is now Raglan Coconut Yoghurt.”

Now known as Mrs Coconut around Raglan, Tesh found it hard to get the formula right at first but once she’d worked out the recipe she knew she was on to a winner.

She said it was supposed to just be hers and Seb’s yoghurt, but then one day she made a big batch and had two extra jars.

“So I thought I’d see if anyone wants to buy one. I just chucked them on the notice board of our local Facebook page, the post said ‘first in first served’ and the whole town went nuts. 

“So many comments like, ‘ohh save me some', ‘my sister needs some’, ‘my aunty needs some’ and I ended up with this long list of like 60 people who all wanted yoghurt. I thought, okay, I guess I’m just going to make a lot of yoghurt this weekend because I didn’t want to let anyone down.

“So I spent the whole weekend recruiting people with jars, visiting the recycling centre for more and scrubbing the labels off them and making little tags to put on them. Seb cut them out of paper and used double sided tape to put them on the jars.”

So Mr and Mrs Coconut found themselves with a fridge full of jars that weekend and people knocking on the door to grab their yoghurt. 

“It was really fun! We got to meet all these people from Raglan that we didn’t know and then they all wanted it again! So we thought, okay, we now have this little business making coconut yoghurt.

“But I don’t have the equipment to make so much yoghurt at home so after the first couple weeks we hired a commercial kitchen in town.” 

Already working full time with their business The Good Agency, where they work with ethical, sustainable businesses on their branding and business strategies, the pair had a lot on their plates.

“It didn’t seem very practical to just start making heaps of yoghurt. Seb was like, ‘are you nuts? Why are we doing this?’. 

“We had heaps else going on as well. We’d just commissioned a yurt to be built on our land so that was coming, I had a children’s book being launched and we’d just bought our first house and it needed tonnes of renovation work and everything just got put on hold. We still haven’t renovated the house!”  

Once they were in the commercial kitchen down the road from their house they still had to store everything in their garage as there was no storage space at the kitchen. 

They loaded the van everyday and went down to the kitchen, then reloaded it at the end of the day to take home and put in the fridge.

“Our garage was just a nightmare of stacks of boxes and this huge fridge that kept us awake at night. It was crazy. We were in the commercial kitchen for a year, making it by hand, stirring it in big pots. We bought big stainless steel pots on TradeMe that people use for beer brewing. The local welder put some urn taps on them so we could fill the jars out of them.” 

Quickly, they decided this wasn't going to work very well; they needed a proper yoghurt making facility. So, they designed it and figured out all the equipment they needed. Just over a year later they moved in.

“It’s so much better, people would laugh if they saw how we were making yoghurt in the first year, but still we won a food award. A New Zealand Gourmet Food award, literally making yoghurt in beer brewing pots.” 

The couple now have 24 staff in Raglan, distribute to just over 500 stores in New Zealand, about 60 in Australia, 15 in Singapore and a handful in Hong Kong. 

“It’s kind of nuts. It all grew so quickly. We are grateful to be where we are now.”

On top of all this, they try to stay ethical and treat their staff well, part of that entails paying their valued workers the living wage. 

“You want to treat people fairly and reward them if they’re doing good work. I don’t really know how people survive on minimum wage. I’d heard of living wage so as soon as we could we put the wages up to it. It’s almost a year ago since we became living wage certified.”

And because they believe in giving back and doing as much good as possible, every year Mr and Mrs Coconut take on a fundraising or charity project of some kind.

“We’ve done different projects every year so our first year we sponsored beehives for schools and families as we were interested in the decline of bees around the world. Last year we thought about dairy run off and pollution into waterways and streams and we found a charity called Million Metres Stream Project and their goal is to plant 1 million metres of waterways with native trees to stop the run off from going into the river so we partnered with them and planted 2100 trees in Waikato.”

This year they thought of a beach clean-up and now have a count down on their website that is set to reach 1 million pieces of rubbish.

“If you do a beach clean-up, we will send you free yoghurt. The goal is to collect 1 million pieces of rubbish off the beach. It’s horrible to go for a walk on the beach and see rubbish everywhere. It can be any beach in New Zealand or Australia. One guy has set his own goal to collect 10,000 pieces and in a week,  he will be at his goal.”

The ethical pair have been in Raglan for five years. Tesh is originally from Northland and Seb, Germany even though they meet in Auckland. 

“We wanted to start somewhere new. We were living in Auckland and just didn’t like it. We’re not big city people. We wanted a veggie garden and we wanted to surf. We moved here to be chilled out hippies. We love the place we live. 

“A lot of people thought it was weird that we kept making the yoghurt here in Raglan now that it’s so big, people have told us to move somewhere bigger where it would be easier, but it doesn’t feel right having a label saying Raglan Coconut Yoghurt if it’s not made in Raglan.”

Tesh said their business always had a community feel to it and that was cemented when other local businesses, like Duck Island Ice Cream and Tony Sly Pottery, started collaborating with them.

"We love to collaborate, it's good for us and other businesses," she said.

The couple are always looking to expand and are happy flowing with their yoghurt’s success into the overseas market. 

“I feel like there is a lot of opportunities within the Asia Pacific area. We are always working on new flavours and we have two new ones that are going to launch within early May. We are also looking at making other products that are in line with yoghurt.

“We just want to be the best coconut yoghurt on the market."

For more on Tesh and Seb's story check out their website here.