David Stanley Email & Phone Number

Canterbury Biltong was started as a hobby using an old farmhouse recipe that I had used to transform, kudo, bushbuck and wildebeest into stupendous biltong.After making a couple of batches I found that New Zealand friends of ours loved the stuff. We took a large batch to the Hokitika Wild Foods Festival and sold out.For the next eight months I worked on the biltong business at night and at the Press newspaper during the day. FreshChoice Merivale gave us our first break when they decided to stock our product in their deli.It was at this point that I resigned from The Press to give Canterbury Biltong a go. We had been making our product in a small home bakery, but had now built our house which included a double garage which I converted into a home kitchen to start the business.This served until 2007 when we felt confident enough to rent our first factory on Ferry Road in Christchurch. Nicole, my wife became our first Sales and Marketing manager. I did everything else.The early days were tough. We had no capital behind us and had to slowly accumulate the equipment we needed.We marketed the products through A&P shows, the Dunkleys Craft Shows and specialist food shows as well as weekend markets. At the same time we developed our stable of retail outlets.The next four years saw us supply Progressive and Foodstuffs supermarkets nationwide along with delis, ski-fields, outdoor shops and the Armed Forces Canteens in the major bases around New Zealand. We were starting to get some good momentum when Christchurch was hit by two massive earthquakes in September 2010 and February 2011.We got through the September one, but February finished our factory off. It took seven months to find another premises in the chaos that enveloped Christchurch at the time.We have since moved again into our own purpose built, export grade factory near the Port Hills. Apart from New Zealand we currently ship our Canterbury Biltong and BITEMEat brands to supermarket and liquor chains in Australia, Singapore, four countries in the Middle East (not liquor there clearly!), New Caledonia and more on the way.Apart from Canterbury Biltong and our family, I love motorbikes, music, cooking (BBQ especially), golf, cricket, my Jeep and the odd beer.

Listed skills include Advertising, Food, Marketing Strategy, Journalism, and 3 others.

• 

  Natal Technicon

  Journalism