January 17, 2025

By Alice Shopland, founder of Angel Food

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

Colin Woods and I became a couple in 2011 and got married three years later. We’d been friends for years, after meeting at a talk by a Filipino trade union leader at the Auckland Trades Hall in Grey Lynn (name a more romantic setting if you can). We walked up the aisle to the sounds of The Undertones’ Teenage Kicks, Colin escorted by his youngest daughter Naomi and me on the arm of my eldest son Nico. I made my bridal bouquet from broccoli and red chillies, and the following day of course we had the broccoli with our dinner.

Colin grew up in Belfast, Northern Ireland, during what is euphemistically called ‘The Troubles’ and was part of the punk scene musically and politically. Meeting vegetarian punks introduced him to a very different way of eating from his meat and potatoes upbringing. He became vegetarian himself when he left home at the age of 20 – for reasons of ethics, taste and budget. “I always preferred the vegetables to the meat anyway,” he says, “so it wasn’t hard for me to stop eating meat.”

He never liked drinking cows’ milk either, which made the compulsory school milk a daily ordeal at primary school. On his first day of school, he tried to decline the milk – and was hauled up in front of the class along with fellow milk rebel Steve (who is still a good friend).

Colin did love eating cheese though and had no qualms about it until he emigrated to Aotearoa New Zealand in 2002. He visited a dairy farm in the Waikato and found it confronting: “I couldn’t help seeing the cows as inmates of a concentration camp.” Over the next few years, he gradually moved from vegetarian to vegan. He says he found goat cheese the hardest thing to give up: “I loved the flavour, and I had this idea that goats were too feisty to allow themselves to be mistreated like cows are. Sadly, I was wrong about that.”

Although he’s a natural academic, Colin hated school and left at the age of 16 because he wanted to earn money for a guitar amplifier. He took an entry-level job in a medical laboratory and that led to a 30-year career as a biomedical scientist. By the time we got together, he had largely retired from that and was following his original passion by studying for a Diploma of Contemporary Music at Unitec. He followed that with a Bachelor of Music in composition at the University of Auckland, a Master of Creative Technology at Auckland University of Technology and is now doing a PhD in sound art at Ulster University. The boy who hated school will be studying until retirement age.

One of the many traits Colin and I share is a DIY can-do attitude; a trait which has got us into trouble many times and saved us many other times. We should know by now that the answer to “How hard can it be?” is usually “Surprisingly hard.” But we’re both relentless optimists. Colin loves a new project, and he jumped in boots and all to work on Angel Food with me.

In about 2012 we decided to stop the imports and focus on developing our own key products, starting with a cheese alternative. People saying they couldn’t live without cheese was my initial prompt to start importing cheese; now criticism about the food miles of our imported vegan products made me want to produce it locally. I don’t regret that decision, but I have since learned that what we eat is more important to the environment than how far it has travelled.

Colin and I are both good and creative cooks and we love solving problems. Add Colin’s strong science background to this and we figured we had a very high chance of being able to work out how to make vegan cheese. We started with mozzarella. The impetus for this was that when we were importing Cheezly, one-kilogram catering blocks had been part of the range and Hell Pizza (Aotearoa New Zealand’s leading gourmet pizza chain) had been interested in adding it to their menu. They wanted to offer their vegan and dairy-free customers a better pizza experience (rather than just a no-cheese pizza), but we couldn’t get the price right for Hell with the imported product. After about a year of trial and error, Colin and I reluctantly admitted we needed professional help with product formulation. An online search took us to the website of a group of contract food technologists, and the profile picture of dashing Dutchman Jan Wuis caught our eye. We arranged to meet Jan to discuss the project and immediately knew that we would enjoy working with him. With years of experience in the dairy industry and a deep-seated concern for the environment, he was intrigued by the idea of dairy-free cheese. He made it clear that he couldn’t promise to come up with a recipe, but he did.