By Les Watkins
One of the most surprising successes in the food industry – and by any standard it is an extraordinary success – is that of the expanding store group Farro Fresh.
Here was an operation which seemed doomed to failure before it left the starting blocks.
Neither of its founders, husband and wife team James and Janene Draper, had any experience in the food business.
They were jumping into a highly-competitive market. They were making blunders. And, what’s more, they were seriously under-funded.
Even their bank manager looked at their ambitions and shook his head. No way. If they needed more money they’d have to go to a different bank.
Before they opened the first one-stop Farro Fresh store at Auckland’s Mt Wellington in August 2006, James was selling golf equipment and Janene was an optometrist.
“And our timing for offering virtually everything in the recipe books – seafood, top-quality produce, cheeses, wine, you name it – was certainly not the best,” says Janene.
“A similar store, Nosh, had opened nearby only three weeks earlier and yet another was due to open a couple of weeks after us.
“I also felt a bit of a fraud because, although we both love good food and I’d spent hours studying cookery books, we really knew nothing about the industry.”
She partially solved that problem by seeking guidance from MasterChef guru Ray Mcvinnie.
“I had to pluck up the courage to cold-call him but he seemed bowled over by our research and enthusiasm,” she says. “In fact, he was so taken with our dream that he agreed to come in weekly to help – starting on the day we opened.”
They also took the advice of their bank manager and found a new one.
“We were working more than 80 hours a week, six in the morning until after six in the evenings, and were doing everything on a shoe-string. And, of course, we made a lot of mistakes.”
However, it worked so well that last October they opened a second store, 20 percent bigger than then the original, on Auckland’s North Shore and August this year saw a third near Hamilton.
They have more than 550 suppliers, including importers and Kiwi producers as far away as Invercargill, and their staff has grown from the original 16 to 180.
They are still growing. A fourth store is planned for early next year and they intend to open yet another two before the end of 2014.
Why the name ‘Farro’?
“Well, that was quite strange because it just came to me when I woke up in the middle of the night,” says Janene. “I’d no idea what it meant or where I might have heard it but it sounded so right that I wrote it down.”
Hours later a Google search showed here that farro was the original ancient grain, the fore-runner of all grains, which was standard food for the Roman Legions.
And, as you might expect, farro is sold at Farro Fresh.
