Akaroa Salmon is a well-known seafood supplier in Aotearoa New Zealand, producing award-winning, restaurant-grade salmon.
We went onsite at Akaroa Salmon and had a chat with sales and customer service rep, Abby de Garnham, about her experience with Fresho.
Tell us a bit about the history of Akaroa Salmon, and how the business started
So Akaroa Salmon is located in Christchurch, New Zealand, and our farm is in the Akaroa Harbour. We have about 70 staff that range across our farm, factory, and admin teams.
We supply a range of restaurants across New Zealand, Foodstuffs South Island, Farro Fresh in Auckland, some domestic wholesalers as well as export.
The company was started in the early 80s by Tom Bates. He was down in Stewart Island on a dive trip when a local fisherman took him to the salmon farm that was getting established down there and he thought “this could work in Akaroa”.
What is it about Akaroa Salmon that makes you stand out?
What makes us unique is our product. We produce a really honest product. Also our service, we’re really friendly and we go above and beyond for our customers. We’ll go and drop off an emergency order on a Saturday to a chef who is stressed out and forgot to order. That’s really important to us.
Talk to us about your processes before making the move to Fresho
So it was very manual. We’d take phone calls from customers throughout the day and then we’d handwrite them onto a carbon copy book. Quite often the slips would get lost in transit, or we wouldn’t be able to decipher what a chef was saying.
We had a few upset customers because we’d muck up their order or wouldn’t get it to them on time.
It was very time-consuming. It would take about an hour in the morning to write out all these orders which could be quite stressful with the first courier coming at 9am.
What made you decide to come on Fresho?
We recently entered a period of drastic growth, which encouraged us to digitalise. Fresho actually came to us and I think we were sold on the first demo.
Fresho had a really good value proposition and everything we needed was there, the ordering system really worked for us. The product totals reports were a big selling point.
How did you find the transition to moving your business online?
It was quite daunting at first, but after launching we realised all the hard work had paid off. We had a Fresho team member onsite helping us on the day, and he actually got to go home early because we just had it sussed from the get-go, it was really easy.
Now that you’ve been using the platform for a while, how has Fresho helped your business?
Fresho saves us about an hour a day. With chefs placing their own orders, there’s no room for mistakes, and we don’t need to interpret what they want.
There’s a lot more efficiency between the admin and dispatch team. More communication with the orders, where the dispatch team finds it really easy to pick up mistakes and what’s wrong because we’re all looking at the same thing.
Fresho has helped our business, save time, money, and a lot of stress!
What’s your favourite thing about Fresho?
Definitely the product totals report.
When we used to take down orders in the morning we would calculate each individual product item by hand. We would sit there and manually add 20 kilos plus 10 kilos plus 30 kilos…
Now we just run a report and everything’s there. It tells us how many kilos, and how many single items for each individual product. We’ve saved a lot of time and probably a lot of bad math!
Any closing thoughts on your experience with Fresho?
I’ve really enjoyed using Fresho. It’s been super easy. The chefs love it, our staff love it, it’s really easy to navigate, and the Fresho admin team have been really helpful whenever we’ve had any queries. It’s just made life so much easier.
