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Graham and Sally Taylor, Long Flat Bacon Company
Like the journey in the proverb, the Long Flat Bacon Company began with a single sow.
The business now encompasses an award-winning farm, a butchery and two retail outlets, offering bacon, ham, specialty sausages and salami, and pork.
Customers include restaurants and delis, as well as over-the-counter and mail order sales.
“Bacon is the big seller,” says co-owner Sally Taylor, who runs the company with husband Graham. “A lot of our customers are Aucklanders in Northland for the weekend. They all tell us they can’t believe it’s proper bacon.”
Proper bacon it is, cured by traditional methods and smoked naturally over manuka sawdust.
The Taylors’ farming approaches at Ariel Farm, including the introduction of poly-houses with sawdust beds, earned them the Pig Farmer of the Year award in 1999.
Their next step was “following the product further down the value chain” or, as Sally puts it, “from birth to bacon”.
The acquisition of facilities at Ruawai and Paparoa and the establishment of the Long Flat Bacon Company made the Taylors masters of their own destiny in terms of production, sales and marketing. Graham comments: “We firmly believe we are in the food business. We’re not just producing pigs that are leaving on a truck, we’re producing food.”
The Long Flat Bacon Company has featured on National Radio, in the New Zealand Herald and in Cuisine magazine, which described it as “fast developing a reputation for fine foods well beyond the district.”
There has also been recognition of the management skills involved in building the business, with Graham serving on the Kaipara District Council and as deputy chairman of the Pork Industry Board.
The couple are both Northland born. Graham was born in Russell, while Sally is a fifth-generation Northlander and descended from one of the first six European families to settle Maungaturoto.
“Northland’s home for us,” says Sally. “It’s the closeness to the sea and the beaches, the people and the atmosphere.”