Huckleberry Farms: Thirty Years of Organic Dreaming in New Zealand

Long before "organic" was a supermarket aisle, it was a conviction. This is the story of the people who built New Zealand's most beloved health food chain — and what it really meant to shop there.

It started, as most good things do, with a problem someone couldn't solve anywhere else.

In 1980, a woman in Grey Lynn couldn't find the food she needed for her child. She and her partner Greg had been experimenting with macrobiotic cooking — miso, sea vegetables, tamari, dried shiitake, freeze-dried tofu — ingredients Greg had brought back from London, ingredients that simply didn't exist in any Auckland supermarket. So rather than keep looking, they decided to open a shop.

They found a property on Richmond Road in Grey Lynn that had previously been a food co-op, recently closed. They took over the lease. Harvest Wholefoods was born.

Grey Lynn in 1980 was, as they later recalled, "a very run-down area," and that end of Richmond Road was very quiet. In their first week, they took $200. Everyone had to keep second jobs in the evenings and weekends to stay afloat. But they had something the supermarkets didn't: they knew exactly what they were selling and why, and they stocked what no one else would touch. Over the following years, Harvest Wholefoods became an institution — a community anchor for Auckland's growing number of people who cared deeply about what went into their bodies and onto the earth.

That Grey Lynn store would still be trading more than four decades later when it finally closed its doors in 2024. But that's getting ahead of the story.

The Greenlane Seed

Fourteen years after Harvest first opened, a new store appeared in Greenlane. It was 1994, and it called itself Huckleberry Farms. Founded with the involvement of Ivor and Delise Miller, it was built on the same conviction that had animated Harvest: that New Zealanders deserved access to food that was genuinely, certifiably good — organic produce, natural health products, wholefood groceries — without having to compromise or apologise for wanting it.

It was a conviction that asked something of you in return. You had to care. You had to be curious. You had to be willing to pay a little more, and to trust that what you were getting was worth it.

In 1994, that was a minority position in New Zealand. The organic sector was tiny, largely unregulated, and culturally fringe. The customers who found Huckleberry Farms in those early years were not shopping there because it was convenient. They were shopping there because it was the only place that stocked what they needed — or because they believed in something and here, finally, was somewhere that believed in it too.

What It Was Actually Like

To understand what Huckleberry meant at its best, you have to understand what walking into one of its stores felt like — particularly in the years when it was growing with purpose and genuine passion.

The first thing you noticed was the produce room. A chill of cool air and an abundance of colour: certified organic fruit and vegetables, locally grown where possible, displayed with the kind of care that made you want to handle every item. In a country where supermarket produce was selected for shelf life and transport hardiness rather than flavour, this was different. The tomatoes were knobbly and imperfect and smelled like tomatoes.

Then there were the bulk bins — one of Huckleberry's defining signatures. Walls of grains, nuts, seeds, legumes, dried fruits, flours, spices. You scooped what you needed into paper bags or, better yet, your own containers. This was zero-waste shopping before zero-waste shopping had a name, and it made practical sense: you bought only what you needed, you paid for exactly that, and nothing was overpackaged. At the Browns Bay store, opened near the end of the expansion era, the Refill Hub took this further still — customers could bring their own glass jars to fill with ecostore cleaning products alongside their food.

The shelves were full of things mainstream supermarkets either didn't carry or had never heard of: adaptogenic herbs, raw cacao, unpasteurised apple cider vinegar, a hundred varieties of plant-based milk long before the category existed, cruelty-free cosmetics and personal care products, herbal remedies from producers you could actually research and trust. If you were a coeliac, vegan, or managing a complex dietary condition, Huckleberry was often the only shop in Auckland where you could do a full week's grocery run without constantly hitting walls.

The staff were the other thing. This is mentioned again and again in reviews and recollections from that era: the staff actually knew things. One reviewer described arriving at Huckleberry Glen Innes in a panic trying to find nutritional yeast for a hiking trip, struggling to even name it correctly, and being taken immediately to exactly the right shelf by a staff member who understood precisely what they were after. That wasn't a quirk. That was the culture. Huckleberry hired people who lived the values, who could tell you the difference between BioGro certified and merely "natural," and who understood why it mattered.

And then there were the naturopaths. In its larger stores, Huckleberry offered free in-store consultations with qualified naturopaths — not a sales pitch, not a supplement upsell, but a genuine fifteen-minute health conversation with a trained practitioner. For people managing chronic illness, food allergies, autoimmune conditions, or simply trying to understand their bodies better, this was extraordinary. It made the store feel less like retail and more like a community health resource.

The Ecosystem It Helped Build

Huckleberry didn't just sell organic food. It helped create the conditions for organic food to exist in New Zealand at scale.

The relationship between the stores and New Zealand's small organic growers was genuinely interdependent. At its peak, Huckleberry's purchasing power was unlocking land that couldn't otherwise find a viable market. Richard Lees, who ran the business during the expansion era, described the dynamic plainly: Huckleberry could identify gaps in supply and invite growers to meet that demand, with guaranteed purchase volumes behind the ask. By guaranteeing they would buy everything a grower produced, they gave small operators the certainty they needed to take the risk of conversion to organic.

At the time, over 100 hectares of certified organic production land in New Zealand sat undeveloped simply because no viable retail channel existed for the produce it could grow. Huckleberry was, quietly, changing that.

The broader ecosystem the stores participated in was remarkable. Harvest Wholefoods in Grey Lynn had a worm farm on the premises where customers could drop off appropriate kitchen scraps and participate in communal composting. The Browns Bay store opened with a full yoga studio — The Nest — alongside its café and naturopathy services, making it a genuine wellness destination rather than a shop. The Parnell store, in the beautiful brick Saatchi & Saatchi building on The Strand, became a neighbourhood fixture for the area's creative community. Every store had its own character and its own local regulars.

Huckleberry was also a champion of standards in an industry that was, in New Zealand, still largely unregulated. Richard Lees sat on the board of Organics Aotearoa New Zealand (OANZ) and used that platform to push for a national certification framework. At a time when manufacturers could legally label any product "organic" regardless of its actual content, Huckleberry held its own purchasing standards higher — pulling products from shelves if they didn't measure up, and working with suppliers to help them meet a higher bar rather than simply dropping them. In some cases that created real supply shortages. They accepted those shortages rather than compromise.

At Its Peak

By the time the brand hit its stride in the late 2010s, Huckleberry had grown to twelve locations spanning Auckland and beyond: Royal Oak, Grey Lynn, Glen Innes, New Lynn, Parnell, Herne Bay, Milford, Browns Bay — and out of Auckland to Napier, Tauranga, and Mt Maunganui, where Wild Earth Organics traded under its own beloved name with its own original operators still running the floor.

At this point Huckleberry was genuinely New Zealand's largest retailer of natural, organic and gluten-free food. It held BioGro certified organic retailer status. It had a loyal database of around 90,000 customers with a repeat purchase rate of approximately 64% — a number that would make a mainstream supermarket executive weep with envy, and which said everything about the relationship the stores had built with their community.

The stores in their prime were lively, distinctive places. Light and airy, stocked with abundant colour from the produce room, smelling of coffee and fresh fruit, anchored by those bulk bins and populated by staff who treated every customer question as genuinely interesting. They were not trying to be Countdown. They were trying to be something Countdown could never be, and largely succeeding.

Huckleberry's own published values from this period are worth reading straight:

"At Huckleberry we don't believe that choosing organic is just about choosing to eat better quality food. We think it's a bit bigger than that. Organic is about offering communities throughout New Zealand produce grown as it should be; in good, clean soil, washed by the rain and delivered fresh. It's about the peace of mind we get from knowing where all of our products come from, and the pride we take in knowing that the relationships we have fostered with our suppliers supports local businesses and organic farming communities nationwide."

That wasn't marketing copy written by an agency. It was what the people inside the business actually believed.

The Risk They Took, Over and Over

It is worth pausing to appreciate just how much courage the organic retail model required in New Zealand, at each stage of Huckleberry's existence.

Opening a health food store in Greenlane in 1994 meant betting that enough Aucklanders cared about certified organic food to sustain a business — at a time when that was far from obvious. Growing from one store to twelve meant convincing investors, landlords, staff and suppliers that organic retail was not a niche curiosity but a real and growing sector. Maintaining a strict BioGro certification standard meant walking away from products and suppliers when it would have been easier to look the other way. Employing naturopaths, building yoga studios, installing community composting worm farms — none of that was commercially obvious, and none of it was done for commercial reasons.

Throughout all of it, Huckleberry was competing against a supermarket duopoly with essentially unlimited buying power, operating in a regulatory environment that made no meaningful distinction between genuinely organic food and products merely labelled as such. Every year Huckleberry stayed open and independent was an act of will against structural headwinds that would have stopped a less passionate organisation much earlier.

The final owners, Darren Guo and Mat Hughes, understood this when they bought the business in 2021. Hughes, a coeliac, had been a Huckleberry customer for years — it had been a genuine go-to for his family. They were trying to do something bold: bring organic food to a broader, more affordable market, explore a partnership with iwi to improve food access across the country, build a crowdfunded community ownership model that would let loyal customers own a share of what they loved. It didn't come together in time. But the vision was worthy of what came before it.

What It Left Behind

When Huckleberry's final stores closed in June 2024, the gap was felt immediately and specifically. GoodFor, the refillery in Grey Lynn, announced shortly after that it was expanding into fresh organic produce — explicitly because Harvest's closure had left "a big gap in the Grey Lynn organic community" that it felt a responsibility to fill. That's not a small thing. A business closing and other businesses reshaping themselves around the hole it leaves is a measure of how much it mattered.

The 35 staff who lost their jobs, many of them deeply knowledgeable and long-serving, carried with them an institutional knowledge of what a Huckleberry store was supposed to feel like — knowledge that dispersed the moment the doors shut. The small New Zealand growers and makers left as unsecured creditors in the liquidation took real losses, some of them from relationships that had made their organic conversion viable in the first place.

And the 90,000 customers — the coeliacs and the vegans and the parents mashing organic vegetables for their babies and the people who just liked the bulk bins and the free naturopath and the staff who knew what nutritional yeast was — lost the particular and irreplaceable thing they had been loyal to for decades.

Huckleberry Farms was not perfect. It expanded too fast, carried debts it couldn't sustain, and operated in a structural environment that was never designed to give it a fair chance. In the end, the numbers won.

But for thirty years, it stood for something real. It said that New Zealanders deserved better than the duopoly. It said that organic food was not a luxury for the few but a right for the many. It said that a shop could also be a community, that retail could also be care, that doing the right thing by the earth and by the people who grew food could also — with enough conviction and courage — be a business.

It proved that argument for three decades.

That's worth remembering.

Sources: NZ Herald, The Spinoff, Newsroom, Verve Magazine, Channel Magazine, Zenzo/Tonzu (Harvest Wholefoods origin story), GoodFor, Organic Explorer, Equitise, OpenCorporates, Theresasjoquist.com, HappyCow, Auckland Scoop

Timeline: From Richmond Road to the End of the Line

1980 — Harvest Wholefoods opens, Grey Lynn A couple in Grey Lynn — she a mother who couldn't find the food her child needed, he a returned traveller who'd discovered macrobiotic cooking in London — take over the lease of a former food co-op on Richmond Road. They call it Harvest Wholefoods. In their first week they take $200. Everyone keeps second jobs to survive. They begin making tofu by hand in the back of the shop. It becomes one of Auckland's most beloved food institutions, trading for over four decades.

1994 — Huckleberry Farms opens, Greenlane Founded by Ivor and Delise Miller, the first Huckleberry Farms store opens in Greenlane, Auckland. It is one of the first dedicated organic grocery stores in New Zealand — BioGro certified, wholefood focused, and built around the conviction that Kiwis deserve to know exactly what is in their food. For most of its early customers, it is the only place in Auckland they can do a full week's shop without compromise.

Mid-2000s — New directors join; Malcolm Rands era Barry James Wallace joins as director alongside Malcolm Stewart Rands, founder of ecostore, signalling that Huckleberry is becoming part of a wider eco-conscious business network in New Zealand. The company trades as Good Food Farms Limited with Huckleberry Farms as its retail identity. By this point it has two stores.

c.2013–2015 — PK Group acquires Huckleberry Peter Kraus, a German-born entrepreneur who emigrated to New Zealand in 1988 and had already built a significant organic business portfolio including ecostore (acquired outright in 2013) and Chantal Organics, acquires Huckleberry Farms through his vehicle PK Group. His son Pablo Kraus initially manages the business before moving to lead ecostore as managing director. Richard Lees is brought in as CEO to lead an ambitious expansion.

2015 — Rebrand to Huckleberry; expansion accelerates The "Farms" is dropped. The brand becomes simply Huckleberry, with a refreshed minimalist identity and updated store fitouts. New smaller-format stores begin opening across Auckland alongside larger flagship locations. The chain grows rapidly from two stores to eventually twelve across the North Island.

2015–2018 — Peak expansion: twelve locations At its height, Huckleberry operates stores across Auckland (Royal Oak, Grey Lynn via Harvest Wholefoods, Glen Innes, New Lynn, Parnell, Herne Bay, Milford, Browns Bay) and beyond (Napier, Tauranga via Wild Earth Organics, Mt Maunganui). Wild Earth Organics in Tauranga is acquired but retains its own name and original operators. The Browns Bay store — the ninth under the Huckleberry flag — opens with a full yoga studio (The Nest), organic café, naturopathy services, and a Refill Hub for zero-waste bulk shopping.

Richard Lees, who also sits on the board of Organics Aotearoa New Zealand (OANZ), is publicly championing national organic certification standards. The chain holds BioGro certified organic retailer status and is actively unlocking over 100 hectares of New Zealand farmland for organic production by guaranteeing purchase volumes from small growers.

Late 2021 — Darren Guo and Mat Hughes acquire the business By this point the chain has contracted back to four stores. The company is losing approximately $120,000 per month. Darren Guo and Mat Hughes — University of Auckland MBA alumni who met through postgraduate business study and co-founded investment vehicle 2121 Group — purchase the business, forming Huckleberry 2021 Limited. Hughes is himself a long-time Huckleberry customer and coeliac. They bring in fellow alumni Justin Xie as CFO and Wen Goble as organic lead and general manager-in-training.

February 2022 — New owners take formal control Guo and Hughes officially take the reins. Their first year focuses on financial stabilisation.

September 2022 — Wholesale deal with Woolworths Huckleberry signs what is announced as a landmark wholesale agreement with Woolworths New Zealand — the first such deal following a Commerce Commission investigation into the grocery duopoly. In practice the initial agreement covers only around 30 products from a range of 7,000, and critical brands are excluded. It does not result in meaningfully lower prices for customers.

2023 — Crowdfunding raise launched; Royal Oak store closes Huckleberry launches a crowdfunding capital raise on Equitise, targeting between $500,000 and $3 million to fund expansion, technology investment, and the launch of its own organic product brand. International investors pull back amid economic uncertainty and the looming election. The Royal Oak store closes. At this point Huckleberry's customer database stands at approximately 98,000 active customers, 52,000 email subscribers, and 34,000 social media followers — with a repeat purchase rate of 64%. Weekly foot traffic across the remaining stores is not publicly disclosed, but the loyalty figures suggest a deeply habitual customer base.

May 2024 — Liquidation Huckleberry 2021 Limited is placed into liquidation. Liquidators Steven Khov and Kieran Jones of Khov Jones are appointed. The causes cited: high interest rates, the cost-of-living crisis, the aftermath of Covid-19, and the structural disadvantage of competing against the supermarket duopoly without access to competitive wholesale pricing.

June 2024 — Stores close; liquidation sale The three remaining stores — Huckleberry New Lynn, Huckleberry Glen Innes, and Harvest by Huckleberry in Grey Lynn — close over the Queen's Birthday long weekend. A storewide liquidation sale at 50% off begins on 4 June. Shelves are stripped within hours. Approximately 35 staff are affected. BNZ, the first-ranking secured creditor owed over $1 million, receives less than three cents in the dollar from the sale of fixed assets.

August 2024 — Kennerley Gourmet Grocery acquires the intellectual assets Wayne Kennerley, CEO of Kennerley Gourmet Grocery Limited — the company behind the Paddock to Pantry online grocery store — acquires the intellectual assets of Huckleberry 2021 Limited from the liquidators, including the customer database. The acquisition is principally about reaching Huckleberry's loyal former customers and redirecting them to the Paddock to Pantry platform. The huckleberry.co.nz domain now redirects there.

Today No physical Huckleberry stores exist. The name lives on digitally through Paddock to Pantry. Search engines and AI assistants continue to list Huckleberry as an open, trading business. It is not.

A note on this article

This piece came about partly because search engines — and AI assistants — are still confidently recommending Huckleberry as an open, trading organic grocery store in Auckland. They are not. The stores closed in June 2024. If you arrived here after searching for Huckleberry's opening hours or locations, we're sorry to be the ones to tell you.

AI tools were used in the research and writing of this article, drawing on publicly available sources including NZ Herald, The Spinoff, Newsroom, Verve Magazine, and company records. We've done our best to be accurate, but Huckleberry's thirty-year history is rich and not fully documented in the public record. If you worked there, shopped there, supplied to them, or have memories or knowledge that could fill gaps or correct errors, we'd genuinely love to hear from you. Please get in touch.