Replace the Cow or Build on It: What New Zealand Food-Tech Learned
Three food-tech founders, three bets on how to change what New Zealand sells the world. One broke, one held and one bet on the movement itself.
New Zealand is one of the world's biggest food exporters, built on dairy and meat. Over the last decade its food-tech founders have made very different bets about what to do with that. Some set out to replace the country's own staples and others to add to them. The most ambitious replace-it bet did not survive the attempt. The pattern that has emerged is not that New Zealand stopped trying, but that the companies still standing are the ones working with the food economy rather than against it and increasingly organising as a movement rather than as lone disruptors. Whether that is wisdom or retreat is the open question.
Shama Lee: the bet that broke
Shama Lee made the boldest version of the bet. She founded Sunfed in 2015 and built one of the Asia-Pacific's first serious plant-based meat brands: Chicken-Free Chicken, a clean-label pea-protein product that reached supermarket shelves in New Zealand and then Coles and Woolworths in Australia. Sunfed raised over NZ$10 million from backers including Blackbird Ventures and Sir Stephen Tindall's K1W1. Then the plant-based bubble burst. Consumer appetite for pricey meat alternatives fell away, venture capital tightened and in April 2024 Lee shut the company down after nearly a decade, telling supporters her investors were no longer willing to clear the way for new capital. By her account the product was not the problem. The market and the timing were. Sunfed was the purest expression of the replace-it thesis and its closure is the reason the rest of this story reads differently.
Angus Brown: the bet that held
Angus Brown took almost the opposite approach and is still standing. With Ārepa, the company he co-founded with Zachary Robinson, Brown did not try to replace a staple. He leaned into a category New Zealand did not have: neuro-nutrition, a range of science-backed drinks developed with neuroscientist Professor Andrew Scholey to support brain function, made from New Zealand blackcurrants and pine bark. The distinction matters. Where Sunfed asked New Zealanders to swap out something they already ate, Ārepa offered something new, built on exactly the clean-and-natural food reputation the country already trades on. After nearly a decade Ārepa is stocked in major chains, exporting to Australia and pitching on international food-tech stages. Brown's bet was that the way to win from New Zealand is to add to its food story, not to overturn it.
Alex Worker: the bet on everyone else
Alex Worker drew the structural lesson. A former Fonterra and Impossible Foods operator, Worker founded Future Food Aotearoa in 2020, not as a product company but as a founders' movement. His premise: a country this small cannot afford for its food-tech founders to keep failing alone. Future Food Aotearoa brings together ten of the country's leading food-tech companies, representing more than $50 million in combined revenue, pools their hard-won knowledge and takes delegations to the big international food-tech events to argue that New Zealand could become, in Worker's phrase, "the Eco Valley of the world." Its steering committee reads like a map of the field, Brown among them. The bet here is not on any single product but on the idea that the sector wins or loses together and that organising it is itself the work.
What the contrast reveals
Set the three bets beside each other and the contrast does the work. Lee tried to replace the country's food and broke against the market. Brown added to it and held. Worker bet that the founders who come next should not go it alone. The companies drawing the most attention now make the same move in their own ways: Daisy Lab, building dairy proteins by precision fermentation, frames itself as extending New Zealand's century of dairy expertise rather than ending it and Leaft Foods is turning the country's pasture into protein rather than arguing the pasture should go.
The honest question is whether that is maturity or timidity. The boldest attempt to remake what New Zealand sells the world mostly failed and the quieter instinct to build on top of it may well succeed. Which is the better use of the same talent is a fair thing to argue about. What is clear is that the founders still standing decided the cow was not the enemy. If you are building in food from New Zealand, the question is not whether to be bold. It is what to be bold about.
Sources: RNZ (Sunfed) · NZ Herald (Sunfed) · Ārepa · Future Food Aotearoa · AGMARDT (Alex Worker)
