The sweet smell of success

After years of manually managing complex food safety and testing processes, a premium New Zealand honey producer called on Abel® to provide greater data accuracy, traceability, quality control and inventory management in a single, easy-to-use ERP system.

The New Zealand Health Food Company (NZHF) knows that businesses must change and adapt if they want to succeed. Since 1988, this small, family-run company has evolved from a supplier of natural ingredients to a retailer of honey, bee products and natural supplements, to a leading exporter of premium manuka honey.

In 2020, not long after the first Covid-19 shutdown, NZHF embarked on another big change to optimise efficiency and safeguard their business by replacing their manual systems with Abel® .

“Our whole business depends on accurate data,” says Geoff Paterson, NZHF’s Operations Manager. “Before Abel, every bit of data was being collected and recorded on spreadsheets and other manual systems. This was both time-consuming and error-prone, and it was a nightmare.

“We had no real-time visibility of our critical data, no end-to-end traceability of our products and no clear, accurate understanding of how our business was performing. Nothing was right.”

Geoff was no stranger to ERP systems, having worked before on three installations of SAP at Fortune 500 and other large companies. “Those were big and complicated systems that took a long time to implement and run smoothly, and they were hated for years to come by users,” he said.

“But Abel is different. They spent a lot of time with us before we went live, getting to know our business and what we needed to do, so the transition was easy and everyone was on board right away.”

Sitting at his desk inside NZHF’s Christchurch office, Geoff holds up a jar of honey from their premium Manuka South range and explains why one 250-gram jar sells for $25 and another $2500.

Manuka honey’s antibacterial properties are measured by the presence of methylglyoxal (MGO), a compound that appears in higher levels in manuka than other honey. The higher the MGO content, the purer and more expensive the honey.

Geoff says beekeepers do their best to ensure honeybees collect nectar only from manuka flowers, but the bees also forage on other flowers, so it’s critical for pricing and export requirements that NZHF accurately measure levels of MGO and other quality factors like UMF (Unique Manuka Factor).

Every drum of honey that NZHF buys is now registered in Abel with a unique code, and every jar of honey produced has a batch number, providing a transparent and verifiable record of the honey’s journey from the hive to the end consumer.

As the honey ages and is blended through the production process, the drums are tested frequently for toxins, MGO levels and other quality markers. Abel captures test results per-unique drum from internal testing and external laboratories.

“We now have all our ducks in a row,” Geoff says. “Everything we need is tracked in Abel and can be brought up in seconds with one unique code for us or any outside auditors to see.”

Abel’s Bill of Materials (BOM) combines materials, overheads, labour and machine costs to assist with cost calculations. Abels BOMs also provide operator instructions to assist with the manufacturing process. Timings in the Bill of Materials set the spans used for production planning. This gives planners improved visibility over actual costs and timings versus planned costs and timings. Better visibility can inform selling prices and improve the bottom line. With Abel, stock turnover has gone from a negative to eight times a year.

“Having the right data has made all the difference in the world for us,” he says. “We can run all BOMs, costings and margin reports through Abel for a thousand unique codes. We may be a small company but it doesn’t look like that now.”

Most of NZHF’s staff use Abel every day across production, operations, sales and accounts.

“Abel has been a godsend. We wouldn’t be doing this well without it. Everything we need can be done in Abel. Sure, some of the ways you do things have to change but not a lot. You don’t need any other software packages. It’s truly a one-stop shop.”

One of NZHF’s biggest achievements is visible on the website of their Manuka South brand – a jar of UMF 35+ “Legacy” Limited Reserve honey, priced at $2499.

It is described as the “world’s most luxurious Mauka honey,” with a potency achieved by “only 0.03% of all tested UMF manuka honey globally,” certified by over 100 independent tests and two Ministry for Primary Industries-accredited laboratories.

Anyone who buys this honey – or any of the less-expensive jars in the Manuka South range – can certify the authenticity of their honey’s potency any time they want, simply by entering the batch number online and clicking to see the lab results.

Geoff says NZHF continues to work with the Abel to find new ways to improve their business and evolve.