The feijoa season usually passes in a blaze of glory. Glorious months with an abundance of the fruit ... and then the season ends. So how can you enjoy feijoas all year round?
Heather Smith is the founder of Heather's Feijoas, which boasts a range of feijoa products, from freeze-dried wedges, to powders, purees and jellies.
Photo: Instagram: Heather's Feijoas
Smith tells Kathryn Ryan she wanted to share her love of feijoas with the rest of the world ever since she tried one in New Zealand.
“We’re on a 680-acre certified organic farm. When I came New Zealand in 1996, I went to one of the few wineries that were in Hastings and I tried a feijoa and I couldn’t believe it and of course I was wondering what to do with the farm so I planted just over 2000 feijoa trees.”
But New Zealand has struggled before to ship the fruit in fresh form, she says.
“New Zealand did a big push in the ‘80s [to export feijoas] but because the fruit was so soft and because you can’t pick it before its ripe or it will stop its ripening process if you pull it off a tree, so they kind of stopped.
“A lot of people planted trees and then they didn’t because of that, but now our technology is a lot better in exporting fresh fruit … So I just saw that ‘hey, we’ve got to get this stuff out of the country in a beautiful form’.
So, with the help of family-run businesses, she developed products that could be sent everywhere and could be kept in freezers.
“I just played around, and I had various companies whether they are in Nelson or Hastings, [I] just did a ton of research and sent feijoas to them and [asked] could they make this for me?
“Then I trialled them with some people I know up here, especially in the organic world, you know, ‘will people like these?’ and I got a lot of support and encouragement and I just went for it.”
One of these products, freeze-dried feijoa wedges, is a great high-energy snack for hikers, she says.
They are crunchy, can be rehydrated, broken up to be in mueslis, or even used in muffins.
“And the skin is still on, so you get all vitamin C, and feijoas have way more vitamin C than kiwi, not to put kiwis down, and potassium.
“There’s even research now on [how feijoas could work as] anti-anxiety and anti-depressants, serious research into antifungal, anti-bacterial.”
Smith has also developed feijoa powder which can go into smoothies, pavlovas, desserts, and yoghurts.
“I’ve made a face scrub out of it. It was quite nice.”
- Check out the Melting Moments biscuit recipe, using Heather's Freeze-Dried Feijoa Powder.
She has also created a cosmetic essence spray from feijoas.
“I’ve got a lot of people who love it for a natural deodorant because of the antifungal, antibacterial side of it but mostly it’s a face spray. We call it a mood shifter because once you spray it on your face, you just can’t help but smile.
“I mean it’s just such a beautiful fruit and everybody is looking for the next super fruit and the feijoa is just so generous in every way – nutritionally, flavour, the integrity through processing, all that.”
While there are feijoas grown elsewhere around the world, Smith says they’re smaller and not as flavourful as the New Zealand variety.
“We need in New Zealand, ideally in Hastings, a factory or processing area that’s dedicated to developing feijoa-processed ingredients with freeze dried, dehydrated, pureed, etc, etc, peeling them, because everybody else is doing apples and kiwis and grapes.
“Feijoas have to wait in the corner until people are freed up, but companies are so busy, so we really need some kind of co-operative or a type of Zespri for the feijoa to create this factory.”
