our story

Eight years ago, my wife and I decided it was time to do something radical, and we moved our lives from Hamilton, where we had spent the last twenty years building a family, to the tiny town of Taipa in the Far North of New Zealand. It wasn’t just a whim; we had a plan to build New Zealand’s very first artisanal salt production unit and start making and selling premium grade sea salt.  In the end we were just beaten to that honour by two weeks by an Auckland salt maker, but we charged on anyway and built something we think is pretty special.

Everything about our little business was designed by us to be as sympathetic to the environment as possible.  From collecting water by bucket, to evaporating water using nothing but sunshine, our environmental footprint is about as small as we can possibly make it.

As we’ve grown, we've always strived to improve and innovate. That innovation has now added bottled drinking water to our sea water products, all made with the same seawater we collect and using just sunshine to power the whole operation.

So now we find ourselves ready for the next step.  Even when we first started making salt as “The Taipa Salt Pig” we had a core belief in mind.  That belief is, that rather than making a massive amount of salt and water way up in Northland and then trucking that salt and water all around the country, we should instead expand our operations by making salt and water in as many regions as possible and selling the bulk of our products locally.

So here we are launching our very first expansion business, “Raglan Salt.” It’s fitting really, because this is where our journey of discovery with salt began.  It started with a plastic tank, a plastic tray and some seawater collected out at Raglan.  Funny how we often end up back where we started.

We’ve been blown away by the positive response weve received by the Raglan locals to our plans to build another solar powered water and salt making operation in their fantastic little town.  This is the first of what we hope will be a nationwide network of environmentally sympathetic production units whose main goal is not only to produce the finest water and salt products in New Zealand but also show that it is entirely possible to produce artisanal products in a way that keeps them price competitive.

Welcome to Raglan Salt and Oceanwater, two operations dedicated to making the best bottled water and sea salt products in New Zealand if not the world.

Surfs up baby!