organic certification
The $450 Dinner and the $9 Carrots
Fifteen restaurants just won New Zealand's first Michelin stars, several of them talking up organic produce. We went looking for the paperwork. Some of it exists. Most of it doesn't.
chocolate
Why New Zealand's Best Chocolate Isn't Certified Organic
On 7 July, fourteen New Zealand chocolate makers launch a shared emblem built on transparency rather than organic certification. It's a quiet bet that knowing the farm matters more than knowing the badge — and the best bars on the shelf already prove the point.
queenstown
Queenstown -The Last Organic Shop in Town
Huckleberry's gone. Wise Cicada's gone. Independent organic retail is dying fastest in NZ's biggest city — yet a small shop in a Frankton mall survives by serving eight regions at once. What its survival reveals about what "organic" is really worth in Central Otago.
chicken
Bostock vs everyone else: is the organic chicken actually worth it?
Bostock organic chicken costs around $200 more per person per year than the standard supermarket brands. That's about $3.85 a week — a takeaway coffee. Here's a side-by-side comparison of what your money is actually buying you, brand by brand and process by process.
chicken
The chlorine bath you didn't know your chicken took
A chicken raised for meat passes through a sequence of inputs and processes between hatching and packaging. Coccidiostats in feed. A chlorine bath at slaughter. Chlorinated water absorbed into the meat and sold by weight. Here's what I found when I mapped the whole journey.
food system infrastructure
The Strait of Hormuz and your butter
When the Strait of Hormuz effectively closed in March, it didn't just disrupt oil. A third of the world's fertiliser trade moved through that channel. NZ farming is feeling it.
New Zealand food system
You Wouldn’t Buy Your Dinner From Temu
New Zealanders assume the frozen vegetables in the supermarket are still mostly local and trustworthy. But as local processing disappears, that choice is quietly being made for us.
