Raglan is a small Waikato Coastal town that’s world famous on account of its fantastic left hand breaking surf. Every day you will find local and international surfers riding the long smooth left-hand breaks at Manu Bay and Whale Bay.

In high summer you will often find the Raglan Salt team down at Manu Bay an hour before high tide collecting sea water using just a couple of stainless-steel buckets. It takes 24 buckets to fill one of the three recycled olive barrels we use to transport the water from the beach to our evaporators. It’s a decent workout at perhaps one of the most stunning natural gymnasiums in the country.

Once we get back to base its time to take a breath.

The water sits in the transport tanks for about 24 hours. It allows all the floaty bits to sink to the bottom and helps with the final filtration of the water before it goes into our main evaporation units.

Throughout this whole process we have had to learn and develop our processes from scrap. That has actually been one of the best parts of this whole process.

When The Taipa Salt Pig first started making salt back in 2019 it was a very simple process that put seawater into shallow evaporator tanks and waited for the sun to evaporate it.  But as with all good things we have developed the process to make production more efficient than ever.

Raglan Salt takes the best of what we have learnt in Taipa to develop a system that can now be duplicated right around the New Zealand coast and beyond.

In Taipa, our first salt making site, and during those great Covid times we decided to experiment with another process. 

We imported a solar still that turns sea water into pure distilled drinking water.  The only waste product from this process was a concentrated brine that is ideal for making salt. 

So naturally the next step was to combine both processes in one place and so the next generation of salt farming was born.

This super unit has halved salt production time and almost doubled total salt production.  It also added a new product we can market and sell in the form of drinking water. This combined unit gives us the opportunity now to really chase our goal of making salt and water right around the coast of New Zealand.

“Steve” is the name we’ve given to our first “second generation” salt and water farm that is the driver for Raglan salt. It’s a different approach to most salt making operations around the world, but we are proud to have developed this system specifically for Raglan Salt.

So how do we get the water from the transport trailer to the evaporators I hear you ask, “you must be using a pump?”

Well, the answer is yes and no.

Why consume power when you can use gravity. Where possible we simply syphon the water from the transport tanks to the evaporators using a hose fitted with cloth filters, this makes sure no large particles can contaminate our salt.

In the event syphoning isn’t possible, we use one simple hand powered pump made in New Zealand by NZ Pumps. Noiseless and a great workout for the Salt Baron’s Biceps!!!

Now it's just a question of being patient.

“Steve” starts by using solar power to make water first, the concentrated brine it leaves behind is then placed in our upgraded evaporation tanks, and after 5-7 days beautiful delicate white crystals start to form.

Next, it's just a question of doing as little as possible to these two products apart from packaging and adding natural flavours to add some extra interest.

It’s a peaceful and very satisfying process.