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Going global - The fine art of selling butter

By Derek Bartosh

Over a decade selling our specialised butter products overseas, we’ve learned a key lesson: you can’t export by sitting on your backside in New Zealand.

Canary Butter - The fine art of selling butter

After completing diligent research you’ve got to get out into the market, and develop relationships with people - be they distributors or end users - in order to understand their differences and any market nuances.

Canary Enterprises began in the dairy heartland of the Waikato in 2001, and the first three years, we focused on exporting butter medallions to Australia. We worked with a distributor to establish our product in food service – five-star hotels, airlines, and restaurants.

Beginning in Southeast Asia in 2004, and working alongside New Zealand Trade and Enterprise (NZTE), we are now established in 14 international markets throughout Asia and the Middle East.

We’ve invariably found that when you go to a market, you uncover other opportunities from simply being there.

We don’t have an offshore base – we’re still a small company of 24 staff. But we have agents and distributors in our international markets who we visit regularly, and we pride ourselves in responding to customers’ queries within 12 - 24 hours.

A point of difference for Canary is that we listen to our customers, and do our best to design products to meet their requirements.

Trying to sell our butter medallions to a major airline in the Middle East, we learned they wanted something a little different. So we developed a flower-shaped rosette of butter specifically for their airline. That was six years ago and we’ve had a strong relationship with them ever since.