What inspired you to start the business?<\/p>\n
The business is owned by myself and my husband Frank (Nagel), who is German. When we moved back to New Zealand from Germany, Frank thought that New Zealand sausages were terrible. He decided he would have a go and start making his own at home, with no experience whatsoever.<\/p>\n
We ended up putting a little commercial kitchen in our laundry in Matamata at the time, around 2008, and we started making sausages for a local cafe. I think he had met the owner who was bemoaning that she couldn\u2019t find any decent sausages, so Frank said he would make some for her.<\/p>\n
That was our first customer, and then we started selling them at farmers\u2019 markets for a good five years and just refining what we were doing before we scaled up to where we are now.<\/p>\n
Frank’s Sausages, founded by Frank Nagel and Sheryn Cook, crafts a range of homemade, high quality sausages out of its Paeroa facility.<\/p>\n
What was it about New Zealand sausages that Frank didn\u2019t like?<\/p>\n
I think it was pork-flavoured beef sausages or beef-flavoured pork sausages. In Germany they\u2019re purists, you just don\u2019t mess with them. It was also just the list of ingredients that they came with. <\/p>\n
All of our sausages exclusively use free-range, gluten-free meat, and we don\u2019t use anything that isn\u2019t New Zealand SPCA certified. None of our meat is imported either, we basically don\u2019t want to put anything in our sausages that we wouldn\u2019t be happy to feed our children or that we couldn\u2019t recognise ourselves.<\/p>\n
You were with My Food Bag for a time, how did that come about?<\/p>\n
In about 2010 we moved to another facility that became available in Te Aroha, and that\u2019s when the business became real for us. We had a staff member, we had a lease to pay, and I had to leave my job at Kaimai Cheese because we had two kids under 1 years old.<\/p>\n
It was pretty rough for a few years, but then we got really lucky with this farmers\u2019 market award that I entered. It turned out that Nadia Lim was judging, right after her win with MasterChef. We managed to win it, and I struck up a conversation with her and said that she needed our sausages for My Food Bag \u2013 and she agreed.<\/p>\n
That really generated a lot of growth for the business, and it helped fund our move to our current facility in Paeroa which was more fit for purpose. But we decided to transition away from My Food Bag and more into supermarkets because we felt we were too dependent on them prior to them listing on the stock market.<\/p>\n
Frank’s Sausages are available in Foodstuffs supermarkets across the North Island, with its chicken sausages the most popular.<\/p>\n
What flavours are the most popular, and any that didn\u2019t work?<\/p>\n
Our biggest sellers by far are our chicken chipolatas and our chicken French tarragon flavours, all of our chicken sausages go really well for us. I wouldn\u2019t say we\u2019ve made any weird ones, just because if it\u2019s not going to sell, we\u2019re not going to make it.<\/p>\n
We did go through a period where we thought we should think about vegan\/vegetarian sausages. Frank and I were both pretty committed to trying to come up with something that was whole-food based. Frank ended up going to a German supplier who gave us three bags of powder to make a \u201cfrankfurter\u201d \u2013 one was for texture, one was for colour and one was for flavour.<\/p>\n
It looked like a frankfurter and cooked okay, but the flavour wasn\u2019t that good. The bigger issue was we put them in the fridge for about three years and they didn\u2019t degrade at all, so that was a bit of a sign maybe not to go with them.<\/p>\n
What would be your advice to a budding entrepreneur wanting to start a business?<\/p>\n
I think don\u2019t be afraid to fail, just be prepared to fail quickly and move on. But also really get sharp on your numbers and cashflow. Cashflow is the lifeblood of a business, and there\u2019s nothing worse than feeling like you can\u2019t pay your suppliers or staff.<\/p>\n
Do you have a small business story you want to share? Send your pitches to tom.raynel@nzme.co.nz.<\/p>\n
Tom Raynel is a multimedia business journalist for the Herald, covering small business, retail and tourism.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"What inspired you to start the business? The business is owned by myself and my husband Frank (Nagel),…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":217243,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[1443,4463,138,1738,17452,4194,24392,13997,131097,8276,5071,131095,49753,1345,221,24396,5620,296,11113,1446,9878,111,139,69,24393,1523,2738,24397,24390,5425,77551,131096,24394,111735,6182,3502,301,2044,19054,24395,1524,14047,5977],"class_list":["post-217242","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-business","tag-about","tag-brand","tag-business","tag-campaign","tag-cofounder","tag-cook","tag-each","tag-editorial","tag-evolved","tag-experiment","tag-feature","tag-franks","tag-german","tag-home","tag-how","tag-inspiration","tag-interview","tag-into","tag-kitchen","tag-making","tag-monday","tag-new-zealand","tag-newzealand","tag-nz","tag-nzmes","tag-over","tag-owner","tag-possibilities","tag-raynel","tag-regular","tag-sausages","tag-sheryn","tag-showcasing","tag-smallbusiness","tag-stories","tag-success","tag-talks","tag-time","tag-turned","tag-uplifting","tag-waikato","tag-way","tag-which"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/217242","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=217242"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/217242\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/217243"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=217242"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=217242"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=217242"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}