Good nutrition delivered to your doorstep

It all started with a desire to help people take control of their own nutrition.

Emma Emery-Sinclair, 33, studied a degree in Human Nutrition BSc (hons) at the University of Westminster in London and while she was there a trend was happening in Scandinavia. A trend that has made its way to New Zealand as ‘the food bag concept’. 

You may have heard of the Cambridge-based company, Emma’s Food Bag. Emma recently sat down with The Waikato Story to share her and her husband Harland’s journey.

“I thought it was a cool concept and that it ticked a lot of boxes for a lot of people. I think, as a nutritionist and while I was doing my degree, it really stood out.

“We learn a lot about biochemistry and physiology and public health and all these things, but there was this reoccurring frustration that we would come back to: we can’t put the food in front of the person.

“So, even with everything we know about the human body and the psyche, unless you can actually put the food in front of the person, it’s hard. Because I’ve studied it, I know it, but they don’t.

“And there are so many pitfalls these days in eating healthily so that was one thing we kept coming back to in lectures – if we don’t get the food in front of them, how can we have a positive impact?

“Meanwhile, I was seeing this concept taking off in Scandinavia and I was making that link. It definitely wasn’t my plan to start a business while I was doing my degree. I thought I would stay in academia.” 

But once Emma finished her degree and got some work experience in London, she and Harland moved back to the mighty Waikato, where Harland is from.

“I had a slightly skewed idea of what would happen,” Emma said.

“I thought I’d hop off the plane and there would be all these super cool job offers come my way, and there wasn’t.”

She was hunting for a job that she could get passionate about, hunting for a career path and there was just nothing in her field. 

“I then came back to the food bag concept, so partly, this business was born out of a frustration that there were no human nutrition related jobs going. So, I made my own job.”

Other than the desire for a passionate career, Emma and Harland had also observed food systems had become very detached from the consumer.

“For example, the carrots you see in the supermarket have been up and down the road and sat in a depot and on an unnecessary journey. There are carrots probably grown closer to your home then those carrots, but you can’t access them.

“There’s a real disengagement between the consumer and where their food comes from and yet I think there’s a real desire for people to really know where their food comes from.

“But the supermarkets don’t tell you that.”

For Emma and Harland this just wasn’t good enough.

“We are both foodies who care a lot about the environment and we care about good nutrition. We didn’t see the current food system supporting any of those priorities that we had and yet we can see there are people who do really care.

“For us it’s a lot about empowering the consumer. Reducing food miles was something that we wanted to do.”

So, Emma’s Food Bag launched in 2013. 

Emma was working full-time, while Harland continued his job as a personal trainer and worked with Emma part-time for the first six months before things picked up and he became full-time too. 

The pair also worked closely with a chef who was a part-time contractor from the beginning and helped with recipes.

“Then we hired a delivery driver. For the first two or three years we hired more people and now we’ve come back down again, which has been quite natural because we’ve grown the library of recipes and put systems in place and as we got to the peak of that people have left and we haven’t needed to replace everyone.

“If their role was recipe creation then we have a library now and we don’t really need two or three people working on that. So, there are six of us now, half are full-time.”

Emma’s Food Bag started in Te Rapa, Hamilton, in what Emma calls a “glorified cupboard”. After a year they moved out to the old meat works in Cambridge on Cambridge Road which used to be a big employer in the 1990s.

Now they’re having to move again as their landlord needs the premises for something else.

“We are moving again. It’ll be the day after our Christmas pack. We will close down for two weeks over Christmas for the move and open up over the new year.”

The move will be to one of their supplier’s sites in Bruntwood.

“It will probably be temporary as it’s our asparagus supplier’s packing shed – they’ll kick off their next season in November so we will move again then, if not before.

“We are looking for somewhere local, but haven’t decided yet. We also thought we might have a retail space, a low waste supermarket kind of thing is what we are thinking, but we will just see how it goes,” she said.

Emma’s Food Bag is delivered throughout the Waikato as well as up to Auckland’s North Shore, Albany, Tauranga, Rotorua, Taupo, and Raglan.

“We have nine different menu options that people can chose from, for two or four people, for three to five meals a week. We also have one that’s three meals called the Inspiration menu that’s gluten-free every fortnight.

“And we launched the vegetarian bag just over a year ago. We are always re-assessing our offering, but we are quite happy with it right now.”

In saying that, she admits they are always working on new ideas and the latest idea in the works is a bespoke menu service.

“So, we’d have 12 to 15 meals where the customer can go in and pick what they want for the week. That’s quite ground breaking because no one is really doing it.

“We are hoping to a run a trial of it this side of Christmas. It changes things a lot logistically so we want to make sure we are doing a good job for our customer too.” 

Emma said all the meals were nutritionally balanced and they don’t follow any fad diets.

“For me, as a nutritionist, it’s important to have good variety in your diet. We have all sorts of different cuisines … European, Asian, American, South American, Mexican, Thai, South African, Scandinavian. We had a very multi-cultural design team at one point.”

But, she said, they really focus on the local aspect when they can.

“We build our menus very much around what’s available and what’s seasonal. 

“We always buy local first. But we still want to keep food interesting for people and there are things like walnuts that can’t be sourced in New Zealand so we have to get them elsewhere.

“It would be quite monotonous if we limited ourselves to just what was available here. We wouldn’t have pasta, or rice, but if there was a local rice grower we would definitely buy from them. Recently we just switched to a quinoa grower in Taihape, which was awesome because we don’t have to source it from overseas anymore.”

Emma said the business was always a work in progress and they were always looking for ways to grow and improve.

“For example, with packaging and waste minimisation, we are always questioning how we can do that better. We look at how we can reduce the level of waste for our customer, but also for our suppliers. 

“We recently got a new wholesale vegetable supplier where we buy a lot of potatoes, carrots etc. and they were using plastic to pack their produce into and we said we don’t want any plastic, ever.

“So, we put them in touch with a biodegradable supplier. They realised what we wanted, and we aren’t their biggest customer, but nobody had made that demand before. They ended up deciding they didn’t want to carry two ranges of packaging so they changed everything to the biodegradable packaging. That was a really big win for us.” 

Emma said the impact she has been making on people’s health through nutritious food and the win they recently had with packaging has made her want to take the business in a new direction.

“I’ve realised it’s the social impact that we can have that makes my life light up.

“So, we are on a journey now to become more of a social enterprise. We’ve always tried to give back to our community and that’s always been a big part of our ethos. But it’s never been an official thing. It’s just been something we do by default. 

“Now we are turning that on its head and putting that at the centre of everything that we do. It now feels more meaningful to come to work.”

She said it was now about figuring out what the social enterprise looked like, what they structured it with and what sort of causes they wanted to affiliate themselves with.

“It’s a new way of doing business really and it’s a very millennial way of thinking. 

“A lot of people tried to tell me it wasn’t going to work because it would be confusing, but I think it’s just the way it’s done now; social enterprises are the new black.

“For us it’s not a strange thing. Most businesses that I choose to support have a very strong ethical focus and it can be completely irrelevant to the product they’re actually selling, but it’s definitely the way forward. 

“I think when people look to buy these days, they look for companies that share their values. There’s a deeper meaning to shopping.”

For more information check out Emma’s Food Bag here.