Sam Weston is a joiner by trade but by night (and weekends) he, and his business partner Wayne Hanright, are producing award-winning Black Garlic from the small town of Blackball on the remote West Coast of New Zealand.
“I originally started Blackball Black Garlic with Wayne to earn some extra cash while renovating my house. My cousin in Australia was doing something similar, so I thought we could give it a go too,” explains Weston.
“We began small, however it soon became so popular that we had no choice but to expand what we were doing. And now here we are, about to open our new production factory, which will allow us to move to the next stage of our offering,” he says.
Black garlic is produced by cooking raw garlic in a specialised incubator, for five weeks, where it goes through a number of processes that cause its colour to change. It also results in a complex group of flavours and has numerous health benefits, above and beyond normal, everyday garlic.
Weston credits early wins to the support of his small town community in Blackball, on the South Island’s West Coast. It’s where he lives with his family - his joinery factory on one side and the black garlic kitchen on the other. And while it may sound like a strange combination, it seems he and Hanright have discovered the right ingredients for success.
But that’s not to say there weren’t a couple of hard learnings on the way to get black garlic into production and to where they are today. A lot of this was due to the difficulty in understanding the correct process of how to cook the garlic, as it’s a niche industry where most of the manufacturing elements are confidential.
For more information: scoop.co.nz