Diane Foreman

Diane Foreman CNZM is one of New Zealand's most prominent self-made businesswomen and the head of the Emerald Group, a private investment company with interests that have spanned property, hospitality, recruitment and manufacturing. She built it without a co-founder, a listed vehicle or a technology story to sell.

What makes her stand out is the distance between the start and the Rich List. She was adopted into a working-class Auckland family, left school at fifteen and was a divorced mother of two by her early twenties, barely covering the mortgage. The later honours, the exits and the boardrooms came after that, not instead of it.

From shorthand typist to Trigon

Foreman was born in 1960 or 1961 to a teenage mother and adopted as a baby. She has said her family did not value education for girls, and that she was told all she needed was “straight teeth and an ability to type.” She left school at fifteen, trained as a shorthand typist and worked as a secretary for Robert Kerridge, then as a medical practice manager and a real estate agent.

In 1988 she married Auckland businessman Bill Foreman, who owned the Hamilton plastics manufacturer Trigon Packaging Systems and was about thirty years older than her. When he suffered a stroke she was appointed to the board as his representative, then took charge of the company. Trigon was already a serious exporter, with manufacturing in New Zealand, the United Kingdom and the United States and hundreds of staff.

Two exits that made the fortune

In 1996 she managed Trigon’s sale to the American packaging giant Sealed Air Corporation for around NZ$130 million. For a New Zealand manufacturer in the mid-1990s, a Wall Street buyer was a landmark deal. She reinvested through the Emerald Group rather than stopping at the cheque.

The second act was ice cream. In 2004 she bought the loss-making New Zealand Natural franchise, folded it into Emerald Foods alongside Killinchy Gold and the Mövenpick licence, and grew the network to hundreds of stores across more than twenty countries. In June 2015 she sold Emerald Foods to a Hong Kong-based buyer for an undisclosed sum, a deal that needed Overseas Investment Office approval because of the East Tamaki land attached to it. She has said the buyer’s ambition for China, thousands of stores against the sixty she had open, was part of why the sale made sense.

What Emerald held beyond ice cream

Alongside food, the Emerald Group has held commercial and industrial property in Auckland and the Waikato, the boutique Emerald Inn hotel on Auckland’s North Shore, and a stake in the executive recruitment firm Emergent. Earlier it also held an interest in Healthcare Holdings, owner of MercyAscot hospitals. The shape of the group has shifted with each exit, but the pattern has stayed the same: buy something underperforming or undervalued, run it hard, and sell when a bigger buyer arrives.

Recognition and public life

Foreman was named EY New Zealand Entrepreneur of the Year in 2009 and later invited back as a global judge, something she has called her greatest personal achievement. She was appointed a Companion of the New Zealand Order of Merit in the 2012 New Year Honours for services to business, won a NEXT Woman of the Year lifetime achievement award in 2018, and was inducted into the New Zealand Business Hall of Fame in 2024. In 2015 she published In the Arena, a book on entrepreneurship, and she has become a prominent mentor for women building companies.

She features in our look at New Zealand women building businesses and our guide to the most famous New Zealand entrepreneurs.

Sources: Wikipedia · NZ Business Hall of Fame · NZ Herald · NBR