January 19, 2025

By Alice Shopland, founder of Angel Food

I’m marking Veganuary 2025 by publishing a blog post a day.

As the business grew, we reached the stage where I couldn’t continue running it myself with voluntary part-time assistance from Colin. We needed to start employing staff. This was a big challenge for me: I’ve never been a permanent full-time employee, but have mostly been self-employed. There were some benefits to not having positive or negative role models to follow, but there were some challenges too. When we took on our first permanent staff member in 2015 the office was one room in our Auckland apartment.

Over the next two years, our turnover doubled year on year and our staff numbers increased to keep up with the workload. But we weren’t making enough money to separate our work from home, and eventually rather than working from home we were living in the office. It was stressful and unsatisfactory – both as a home and a workplace, for us and our staff. With hindsight, we should have found a way to operate with fewer staff, but at the time I didn’t know that would be possible.

Being an employer has pushed me out of my introverted conflict-avoiding liberal comfort zone many times. I’ve failed to act quickly enough when staff haven’t been performing, preferring to give them a little more time to prove themselves. I’ve had to put people on notice and I’ve had to fire people.

In 2016 our first local competitor launched, the Zenzo brand from Chalmers Organics, the company behind the long-established Tonzu tofu brand. I hardly slept for a week, thinking that the market wasn't big enough for both brands and they surely had all the advantages because they had their own factory and a large range of existing products. (I tried their cheese, hoping it would be terrible, and was disappointed that it was pretty good; but as someone pointed out to me, a competing product that put people off dairy-free cheese would not be a good thing.) Our sales dipped when Zenzo first launched, but they bounced back quickly because the market was very much in a growth phase. More brands in the plant-based cheese space have helped to make it more visible and more viable, as well as keeping us on our toes. Since launching mozzarella in 2014, we’ve added cheddar to the range (2017), cream cheese (2019), grated cheese (2020), smoked cheddar (2021, deleted 2024), feta and sour cream (both 2023).

We’ve never had our own manufacturing facility, but instead have worked with contract manufacturers. There are benefits to this approach, including less capital required, but one of the downsides is that you can never fully reap the rewards of increased volume. Add to this the fact that food is a low-margin business and that we’re in a niche business in a country with a small population, and it becomes very difficult to make a profit.

The food industry is easy to get into but hard to make a success of. I came into the industry with a very idealistic view: I believed my enthusiasm and mission would more than compensate for my lack of experience. I was wrong about that, and my inexperience has at times been detrimental. I have put my trust in people over the years and several times that trust has been violated, once to the extent that it was almost a death knell for the company.

Over the years I have not wavered at all in my commitment to the business or to the beliefs that led me to establish Angel Food. But several times things have been so tough that it’s been hard to see the way ahead. On the day of Angel Food’s tenth-anniversary party, I was on the verge of calling it quits – but had to be at the party with my happy face on. Although I originally started the business with my sister, and subsequently have had Colin as an invaluable key collaborator, I have effectively been a solo entrepreneur. That was my choice, but it’s been tough. My energy levels have varied and so have external demands, but still, the business needs managing.

Looking back I didn’t have sufficient experience or the right personality to establish an efficient business, but I focused on what I wanted the business to achieve and hung in there. I’ve had advice from people, some of it from people I admire and respect very much. But the advice and inspiration need to be timely and relevant to your external circumstances and your personality.