Angel Food is born
January 14
By Alice Shopland, founder of Angel Food
I’m marking Veganuary 2025 by publishing a blog post a day.
One day I was in a group of vegans bemoaning the state of the world when one guy casually remarked how, “We all want change in food but none of us have a food business.” That, combined with my overdeveloped sense of responsibility, sparked an idea and within months I was running a very small food business called Vegan Vittles alongside my freelance writing and academic proofreading work. (‘Vittles’ is an old English word for food; I liked the alliteration with ‘vegan’ but most people didn’t know what vittles meant so it wasn’t a good business name.) I’d always enjoyed writing stories about business owners, admired the creativity of establishing a business, and thought I’d rather like to do the same myself. Even so, I went into my micro food business thinking of it primarily as a vehicle to encourage veganism.
I decided to start by importing vegan cheese because so many people had said to me, “Good on you for being vegan. I couldn’t do that because I can’t live without cheese.” I naively thought that if I made good vegan cheese accessible, people would quickly become vegan. An acquaintance offered to bring some samples of vegan cheese from the United States, which I gratefully accepted. They were all better than the Australian product that was available in Aotearoa New Zealand but – unsurprisingly – they were more American in style than the cheese New Zealanders enjoy. I got samples of United Kingdom vegan cheeses sent over: Scheese from the Isle of Bute in Scotland and Cheezly from Corby in England, and I thought these were closer to the cheese Kiwis are used to. I started importing Scheese (which has since simplified its name to Sheese) in tiny quantities: it was airfreighted, in polystyrene boxes with ice sheets.
I put a glass-door commercial fridge in the corner of our small living room and sold it direct to individuals but also started wholesaling to organic stores and gluten-free stores. Unfortunately, most organic stores weren’t keen to stock Scheese because at that time it contained hydrogenated fat. I should have done some market research before I jumped in and started importing the product. I switched to importing Cheezly. In the United Kingdom, this product was sold in round blocks (the shape of a camembert), but for export, they made it sausage-shaped, in a tube with a metal clip at each end. This was a very practical solution, giving a long shelf-life, but in a world that struggled to grasp the concept of dairy-free cheese, the unusual packaging was an additional stumbling block.
Word got out that I was importing vegan products, and vegans and dairy-free people started requesting products they wanted in their lives. Gradually I developed what in hindsight was an eclectic and disjointed range:
• from Germany there were gluten-based salami sticks and individual portions of tofu-based pâté
• from England there were jelly crystals, sweets and a powdered parmesan alternative called Parmazano, as well as the Cheezly
• from Brazil there was sweetened condensed soya milk (including a delicious dulce de leche caramel version)
• from the United States (via another Aotearoa New Zealand importer) there was liquid smoke, a common ingredient in the United States where many vegan cookbooks originated from back then. Liquid smoke is still a staple ingredient in my pantry, but I wasn’t sorry when we stopped selling it – it’s potent stuff and when a few of the little glass bottles inevitably got smashed in transit it was an absolute nightmare to clean up.
The first product under the Angel Food brand was Cheesy Sauce Mix. There was a similar mix in the United States which I wanted to import but it was too expensive, so I decided to invent my own, based on chickpea flour and corn starch. Later, we added a powdered parmesan because the one we were importing from the United Kingdom was being discontinued, so I decided to formulate my own version. My innovation was to use coconut flour as a base rather than the soya flour of the original, to make it more allergy-friendly; Angel Food’s powdered parmesan is still made to a very similar recipe to this day.
Sales were growing slowly, but I was a long way off making a living from them – I always had to continue working as a freelance writer and I was always stretched for time. I made it difficult for myself by being too far ahead of the market. Also, the margin on the products was tiny, partly because as a vegan activist I didn’t want the price to be a deterrent, but also because it was all done on an inefficient scale. I would drive out to the airport to collect the big cartons arriving from Germany or Brazil. The boxes were almost always slightly crushed and opening them to inspect the contents back at home was a nerve-wracking process. Every squished pack of pâté or dented tin of sweetened condensed soya milk was costing me money.
I loved being part of the food industry but knew I hadn’t yet found my niche. I had been following the growth of a vegan bakery in Washington DC called Sticky Fingers, and I was inspired by their success and their vegan assertiveness: for example, customers were prohibited from wearing fur coats in the shop. I felt that a bakery full of vegan treats would be a great way to break down some misconceptions about vegan food. I persuaded my sister Sue (not a vegan, but a lovely human and a talented professional baker) that she and I should join forces and open a wholesale vegan and gluten-free bakery in Auckland. We settled on the name Angel Food: the idea was that we would be the angels delivering sweet treats that were otherwise not an option for vegans or those with an allergy or intolerance to dairy, eggs or gluten.
We rented a small commercial kitchen in the Auckland suburb of Point Chevalier, at the back of a vegan-run organic store. It lasted less than a year: we didn’t have sufficient business experience and there wasn’t enough of a market. Sue had wisely kept her day job as a baker for a café that was famous for its baked treats. I’m very grateful that the stress of the failed venture only caused a rift between us for a very short time. (Love you, sis.)
I decided to continue operating under the name Angel Food but refocus on the packaged products. A few years later my husband Colin and I met with a retail sales consultant who took one look at the product range we were so proud of and said, “They look like you made them in your garden shed.” That hurt! But once we’d regained our dignity, we looked at the range objectively and saw she was right: we needed to take a more professional approach. We had persisted with products that simply didn’t sell enough, we had added products because they were available rather than because they made sense as part of the range, and we hadn’t given enough consideration to how professional they looked on-shelf. Some tough decisions were made, and we decided to restrict our range to dairy alternatives, especially cheese.
