Six People Shaping Real Food in New Zealand

You can't dig into New Zealand's food system for long without meeting the same people. They turn up in the footnotes, on the panels, behind the farms and the labels. For a while I treated them as background. Then I realised they are the story — the people quietly doing the work while the rest of us argue about price.

This isn't a ranking. It's a handful I keep coming back to, and a small attempt to say so out loud. There are more than six. I'll keep introducing you to them. But here's where I'd start.

Emily King

An environmental lawyer who left the law for food. She wrote Re-food, a 2023 book about the troubled food system of Aotearoa, writes The Crunch on Substack, and runs the food-systems consultancy Spira from Waiheke. She's the closest thing to a fellow traveller I've found here — long-form, system-level, asking who controls what we eat and whether we're allowed to see how it's made. If you read this site, you'll recognise the register. Start with Re-food.

Jodi Roebuck

Three decades growing. Roebuck Farm sits on the edge of New Plymouth — a market garden that supplies local restaurants and shops with produce picked the same day, grown a stone's throw from where it's eaten. He teaches growers around the world. And he says the thing most regenerative-farming talk tiptoes around: you can only be green if you're not in the red. Sustainability that doesn't pay is a hobby. He's made it a business. That honesty is why I trust him.

Sarah Smuts-Kennedy

She started as an artist. For the Love of Bees began as a question — what would a city actually safe for bees look like? — and became OMG, an organic market garden planted at one of Auckland's least likely intersections. Then it became Earthworkers, a course that has quietly trained a generation of growers now working land all over the country. It's the most interesting throughline on this list. Art into agriculture. A single garden into a network. Proof that "community" isn't a soft word.

Fran Bailey

She grew up on a Tokoroa dairy farm, left farming behind, and then found her way back through the unlikeliest door — three years working at Groundswell, Britain's enormous regenerative-farming festival. She brought the idea home and built Underground, New Zealand's only festival of soil, food and farming: hundreds of growers and farmers under canvas in a vineyard, swapping what they know over a shared meal. She also started Soil Sisters Aotearoa, a network for women working the land. What strikes me is the role itself. Not growing the food, not writing about it — building the rooms where the people who do can find each other. A community needs someone to throw the party. She says it's about celebrating good produce and the people behind it. That's exactly the job.

Bridget Henderson

Two decades in organic and biodynamic farming — and, the part that matters if you've ever squinted at a label, she audits the certification. Regional chair and auditor for Organic Farm NZ, chair of the Biodynamic Council, and she works on a certified organic dairy farm north of Auckland. When a stamp on a carton actually means something, it's because someone like Bridget went and checked. I think it's worth knowing what those people look for. I'm hoping to find out.

Angela Clifford

She runs Eat New Zealand and co-owns The Food Farm in North Canterbury. Her work sits a level above the shelf — food security, procurement, who grows what and why. When Wattie's closed its frozen vegetable line, she framed it plainly: procurement shapes production. What the big buyers choose to buy decides what the country bothers to grow. It's the kind of sentence that quietly reorganises how you walk through a supermarket.

Six isn't the whole picture. There are growers, makers and writers I haven't named yet, and plenty I'm still learning about myself. But that's rather the point.

No one is doing this alone. Organic food in New Zealand isn't a label you buy — it's a community of people, with a busy certified middle and a lot of interesting edges. The closer you look, the more crowded and generous it turns out to be.

I'll keep introducing you around.