Small Business: Bark to match the bite with Howler Hotdogs

My husband Brent and I felt that hotdogs are an item of Kiwiana, but they haven’t really changed in the last 30 years. When we bought this business in 2009 it was very much a second-tier player at the time. We thought surely we could do better, and it was really about redefining and reimagining hotdogs for the present-day consumer.

There was a strong movement of premiumisation of product at the time, and it was asking ourselves would a premium hotdog work in this market? At the time our kids were young teenagers and other mums were saying they wanted something where they could actually understand what was in the product, so it’s been quite a journey to where we’ve got to with the range now.

Howler Hotdogs is the largest manufacturer of hotdogs in New Zealand.

How has the product range expanded?

We started out with just a nice beef mini sausage, and then over the years we’ve tried a few flavours. Some worked and some didn’t, but we’ve also started catering for that special dietary market which has been both important for us personally and for the business.

Our son developed Crohn’s disease, and any medical person will tell you to you need to get rid of inflammatory foods out of your diet, which are very much wheat and dairy. So here we were making hotdogs that he couldn’t eat, and it didn’t go down well.

It also was the sudden realisation that when you’re a family who’s got someone with special dietary needs, where you dine out is really dictated by that person. The safest way to do things is at home where they can control cross-contamination. We see it very much as social inclusion because if the family’s having fish and chips, how do you cater for that person who’s left out?

You’ve recently entered the Korean Hotdog market, why so?

We’ve been playing around with the idea of Korean Hotdogs for about three years thinking they were a cool thing. There are definitely chains in New Zealand that have popped up as well, which hasn’t influenced us, more so just the timing on when to make the leap.

Consumers love things with cheese in them, and we had one of the supermarkets who supply our products get in touch last year asking us whether we still had this idea ready to go. It proved to be quite the unexpected challenge, as our supplier couldn’t cut the cheese sticks to the right dimensions. We ended up building our own cheese cutter over the winter, after I asked an engineer friend who had just built an ultrasonic cutter.

Originally a psychiatric nurse, Jo Williamson has spent nearly two decades transforming Howler Hotdogs.

What has been the biggest challenge in running the business?

The Christchurch earthquakes, they just about took us out of business. At the time the business was barely viable, and then we lost 25-30% of our turnover overnight. As well as working on the business, I had to go back to nursing part-time.

Looking back now, it just slowed everything down so much because we just didn’t have the spare cash to do a lot of the things we were planning on doing. The lessons we learnt during that time served us really well with the likes of Covid.

Covid was tough for a very short period at the start, and we were really concerned again. But then it completely flipped the other way with the lockdowns. People were only able to purchase stuff at the supermarkets, so we were absolutely running to keep up with the demand.

What comes next for the business?

We’ve recently moved to a premises that’s three times the size and invested in our new production line with four times the capacity, and we’ve got another product that we’re busy testing out at the moment for next year.

Taking our products overseas is squarely on our radar. We’ll be sending a couple of shipments to Australia just as test runs next year, and we’ve got similar plans for the Pacific Islands.

What would be your advice to a budding entrepreneur wanting to start a business?

It would definitely be around market validation, because it’s just too easy to be influenced by people around you. They may think it’s a good idea, but that’s completely different to someone actually getting money out of their pocket and paying for your product. Understand who you’re talking to, who the product’s for, and why they are going to buy it over other alternatives.

Do you have a small business story you want to share? Send your pitches to tom.raynel@nzme.co.nz.

Tom Raynel is a multimedia business journalist for the Herald, covering small business, retail and tourism.