WineWorks has an impressive sustainability story to tell. But unlike the first company covered in our sustainable companies series – Napier Port – WineWorks doesn’t have a high profile with the general public. In fact, WineWorks might be one of the biggest companies in Hawke’s Bay that no-one has ever heard of.
Before we get to its sustainability programmes, let’s take a step back and talk about WineWorks and how things got started nearly thirty years ago.
WineWorks is a contract bottling, warehousing and distribution company that serves New Zealand’s winegrowers. With sites in Auckland, Marlborough and Hastings it employs around 500 people and currently bottles for 400 of the country’s 700 wineries, producing 140,000 cases per day at peak production, with 85% of it exported. That makes WineWorks New Zealand’s leading contract bottler of any beverage or liquid.
Tim Nowell-Usticke founded the company in 1995, on his return to New Zealand after seven years working in Australia’s fast moving consumer goods sector. He was looking for a local opportunity in the food sector, and in particular what low value food could be turned into a high value product.
“I was thinking in terms of a Watties or a McCain, or an organic baby food company, but actually the latest crop to hit Hawke’s Bay had been grapes. And I thought, grapes can turn into high value wine.
“That got me really excited, and I started going around the wineries asking what services they needed to turn their grapes into high value product. The answer came back: storage and bottling.”
And that’s where it all started in Hastings in 1995. WineWorks Marlborough came three years later, with Auckland following in 2013. Today WineWorks Hastings has a workforce of around 100.
WineWorks is a big enterprise. It has enough capacity to fill and pack a container every 10 minutes, meaning that a significant part of its operation is running supply chains. Trucks are arriving every 15 minutes from the glass plants, the mills that make the pallets, the cardboard plants, and the label printers, as well as trucks departing to load ships in the ports of Napier, Nelson, and Tauranga.
WineWorks is an integral part of its customers’ businesses, says Nowell-Usticke.
“Many of my clients say that their business couldn’t exist without us. That really gives me the warm fuzzies inside. After all, it’s not WineWorks’ growth, it’s the wine industry’s growth.”
WineWorks is the tool that wineries need to convert their product into high value wine, he says.
What other tools do they need? “These days they need a good carbon footprint story.”
Adding value through sustainability
WineWorks’ sustainability journey began in 2019. The company knew it had to take a leadership position, and become carbon zero so that clients selling into carbon conscious markets like Scandinavia and the United Kingdom could secure listings.
Nowell-Usticke says it was the right thing to do.
“We also had several clients who had decided to be leaders in the field.
Yealands Estate in Marlborough was one of those. They said: ‘We’re going to be the world’s first carbon zero winery’, and they couldn’t become carbon zero without help from us.”
The service that WineWorks provides to customers is a large part of the customers’ supply chain. Nowell-Usticke knew if WineWorks was to make the change for one customer, it made sense to do it for all, so the rest of the client base was asked if WineWorks going carbon zero would be of interest. The answer was an overwhelming yes, he says.
“I knew that our clients couldn’t claim to have a carbon free supply chain, if WineWorks wasn’t carbon free. That’s when we got involved with Toitū.”
Toitū Envirocare is a business specialising in carbon management and carbon neutral certification, helping businesses to realise efficiencies, reduce their carbon footprint, and be more sustainable.
These days WineWorks is New Zealand’s only net carbon zero wine bottling facility, achieving this milestone in December 2023.
Net carbon zero for WineWorks means the company has reduced or eliminated emissions, wherever possible, and purchased carbon offsets for any remaining emissions.
Starting out, WineWorks pledged to reduce carbon emissions by 30%, by 2023. It began by tackling the low hanging fruit: waste going to landfill, recycling, and electricity.
Nowell-Usticke says the first moves on the sustainability journey are the easiest.
“We changed to a fully regenerative electricity company. We get supplied by Meridian from the dams, so there’s no Huntly power station component to the energy. That’s a big tick…saving us a good 20% of our previous carbon footprint.”
WineWorks’ North Island sites are powered by Ecotricity: the country’s only Toitū climate positive electricity provider. WineWorks Marlborough partners with Meridian and offsets emissions through carbon credits. Other electricity related initiatives include upgrading lighting to LED, installing timed motion sensors, and modifying high energy use machinery and/or changing how it was used.
WineWorks says the key takeaway from the energy part of its sustainability journey is that the changes made were simple, at the ready, impactful, and accessible for anyone to achieve.
Industrial scale recycling
Recycling is another area where WineWorks has made good progress.
“Four years ago we started recycling everything: plastic, paper, polystyrene, aluminium screwcaps, and put in pretty good systems around that.”
First published by BayBuzz. Click here to read the full article.