Wattie’s

Heinz Wattie’s Limited (or simply Wattie’s) is a New Zealand–based food producer of frozen and packaged fruit, vegetables, sauces, baby food, cooking sauces, dressings and pet foods in the New Zealand market.

Founded in Hawke’s Bay in 1934 by Sir James Wattie and Harold Carr, the company initially operated under the name J. Wattie Canneries Limited (later J Wattie Foods Limited and its related companies). Its first product was jam, as Wattie was unhappy that an Auckland jam-making business intended to import jam pulp from Australia.

The market for canned fruit and jam was by no means limited to underpopulated New Zealand in those early years. Though an independent country as of 1907, New Zealand had close financial and cultural ties to its mother country, Great Britain, and as a member of the British Commonwealth, New Zealand theoretically had access to markets in Great Britain and worldwide. Speculating that Great Britain would provide a good market for canned vegetables, Wattie soon was searching for land on which to raise peas, asparagus, and tomatoes.

The 1950s and 1960s were characterized by expansion, mergers, new product lines, and Wattie’s entrance into the computer age. When some employees expressed their concerns that the dramatic transformations would turn the company into a giant, impersonal monolith, Wattie maintained that for an industry to make a profit, it had to invest in new machinery, and such machinery was increasingly costly in an age of rising labor costs and shorter work days. Hence Wattie Canneries Ltd. began a program of continuous expansion.

With Wattie’s generating $400 million worth of sales in 1992, Goodman Fielder of Australia decided to sell off its Wattie’s concerns by letting Wattie’s float on the New Zealand stock exchange. The giant multibillion dollar food processor, H. J. Heinz of Pittsburgh, snapped up the Wattie’s five food processing concerns for $300 million in October 1992.

Although a subsidiary of Heinz, Wattie’s remained a vital industry in New Zealand, employing thousands of New Zealanders and generating multimillion dollar sales, as well as commanding a 65 percent share of the processed food market in that country. In a country with the highest environmental standards in the world, Wattie’s strictly monitored and limited chemical spraying, experimented with the large scale growing and processing of organic foods, and continually sought environmentally sound and less costly alternatives to their production methods.