Elysian Foods has been delivering a taste of Greece to New Zealanders for over 20 years, producing a range of popular Greek dips.
They sell traditional dips like tzatziki and taramasalata, as well as original creations like a creamy vegan olive dip.
Toby Green tells Kathryn Ryan he took over the business in 2017 from the Greek owners because he didn’t want to lose his favourite taramasalata dip.
Elysian Foods Photo: Supplied
“When I heard the Greek family were going to close the business down, I realised I had to step in and buy it, because we’re they only people that make taramasalata in New Zealand.
“It is quite a healthy dip made from salted fish eggs. So slightly unusual but we have a pretty loyal following around New Zealand.”
Green believes they might also be the only manufacturer making a creamy vegan dip from green Greek halkidiki olives.
“The initial impetus was to come up with a vegetarian/vegan alternative to taramasalata ‘cause when you’re out doing tastings, a few people are put off by the salted fish egg angle and we found that switching from salted fish eggs to olives just made this beautiful dip that people have really embraced.”
Since taking on the business, Green set out on a mission to move to plastic-free dip containers but found the task more difficult than he could have ever imagined.
Elysian Foods has trialled bamboo packaging as an alternative to the current plastic ones. Photo: Supplied / Elysian Foods
“At a household level, in my house, we’ve always tried to minimise waste and go as plastic free as possible. And here I was running a business that was growing quite fast, and last year we sold enough dips to generate two tonnes of plastic waste, and I thought well there has to be a better way.
“Just by chance, we ended up with some of these bamboo pots from a takeaway during lockdown and I thought well they look really good … surely that’s a much a better alternative.”
So they trialled the bamboo pots and they held up well, but then there were other environmental factors to consider, he says.
"Where's that bamboo coming from? Are you chopping down native rainforests? How much carbon emissions are there?
“And then if your bamboo part of it goes to a landfill and they’re not collecting the methane off the top of it, then when it decomposes, it’s giving off lots of methane which is really harmful to the environment.
“So basically at this stage, with the limited amount of information that we have … we should switch to number one plastic, then you have more of a closed loop, because we don’t really know what happens to number five, it’s not that easy to recycle in New Zealand, but we do know that number one can be recycled.”
Sales have grown over the pandemic, Green says, with the manufacturer now supplying 100 supermarkets around the country.
“We actually stopped doing any sales and marketing last year because we reached capacity in our old premises and we’ve just moved to a new warehouse in Petone, built a much bigger kitchen, with the idea that we can now buy some new machines and switch to number one plastic packaging hopefully.”
Elysian Foods' Toby Green featured on Consumer NZ's podcast to discuss his quest to ditch the polymers:
