Packs of Good Taste
IT’S ALL GO at Pitango HQ, home of freshly made, ready-to-eat risottos, curries and soups. Crossing the car park, I’m almost swept away by a forklift shifting pallets of organic potatoes. Meanwhile, up in the boardroom, Yasmin and Ofer Shenhav, the company’s founders, are battling it out: there’s a critical decision to be made about risottos. Ofer dashes down a corridor, back to the phone. “It’s a bit crazy right now,” Yasmin explains. “We’re having to turn everything around at a moment’s notice.”
On the wall I spay a poster of a child – Shenhav Junior – in Pitango heaven, having great fun with a bowl of soup. He’s wearing most of it.
Yasmin, his mother, tells me how it all began. In 1999, she and Ofer came to New Zealand with little more than the packs on their backs and their work skills: Yasmin the dancer and Ofer the chef.
They saw a gap in the market for ready-to-eat meals that didn’t involve hours at the stove, and looked and tasted good. “We must provide good food for the people we love,” Yasmin says. So the chef and the dancer started Pitango. As a child growing up in Israel, Yasmin used to gorge on the intense, cherry-like fruit from the tree of the same name.
Gradually the firm’s distribution network and reputation widened. After soups came curries and risottos, all made with ingredients you’d have at home – organic and free-range – and ready to dish up in around five minutes.
Yasmin pulls packets of risottos from a box to show me, beaming as she lines them up across the table. Anything with pumpkin in it flies off the shelves, I’m told. “People are crazy for it.”
Pitango is nowCarboNZero certified. “You make something; there is an emission associated with it. So you have to cancel it out. It’s a case of going, ‘This is what we’ve done; this is what we need to do, “ Yasmin says.
“Every step of the process is measured and assessed, from moving rice out of Italy or carrots and potatoes up from Hawkes Bay.” The greatest change the couple made was switching from air to sea freight for exports to Australia. It cut emissions by 60 per cent.
“We’re a great fit,” Yasmin says. “Ofer’s the brains behind the food and I make it work.” They refuse to compromise on quality. “If I’ll have it for my [two] sons, it’ll go into the market. Otherwise, it won’t.”
Nearly a decade on, Pitango is still committed to real ingredients prepared by chefs who peel and chop.