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A blend of baby lettuce leaves and edible flowers grown at a Tauhoa market garden has bagged a top award in this year’s Outstanding NZ Food Producer Awards.
Salty River Farms’ Baby Leaf Lettuce with Edible Flowers was named Fresh Produce Champion at the awards ceremony, which was held in Auckland last month.
Growers Daryn Rickwood and Louise Penny said it was a big surprise to win and they were proud to win a major award the first time they entered the competition.
“Over the years, we’ve had a couple of people say we should enter one of our bagged products, so this year we thought maybe we should,” Penny said. “It’s our biggest seller.”
Salty River sells its range of vegetables and salad at the weekly Matakana Village and Catalina Bay farmers markets and via online deliveries, something that they only started doing as a result of the pandemic.
“We started online in the first lockdown, which totally saved our business, and that’s when I also found home compostable bags, as we don’t use plastic bags.”
For the awards, the couple hand-delivered samples of their lettuce packs to the judging venue, Peter Gordon’s Homeland restaurant in Auckland’s Wynyard Quarter. Judges praised the blend for being “beautifully sweet and nutty, and the flowers are lovely”.
Penny said they would be entering the awards again next year and were working on a few new products.
“We got really good judges’ feedback and got to have our product in front of chefs and food writers that really know New Zealand food,” she said. “We really enjoyed the process.”
Other local producers who won gold medals in the awards included Puhoi’s Momojo for its natural and strawberry kefirs, Wild Delicious from Matakana for its kimchi, Whangaripo Valley Free Range Eggs, and Durham Farms at Waipu for their organic eggs and A2 Jersey milk.
Matakana Village Farmers’ Market was runner up as the people’s choice favourite market, a category it won last year.
Awards head judge and Mahurangi Matters food columnist Lauraine Jacobs said she was pleased to see both new and old producers and growers recognised as champions in the contest, which features seafood, meat, dairy, earth/grown and drink categories, as well as special awards for sustainability, new products, NZ spirit, emerging businesses, fresh produce and outstanding free-from products, such as gluten free.
