Adventure Magazine

Frankie Sanders & Emily Warne
leading the way to sustainability
Local Dehy, a small food manufacturing company based in Lake
Hawea, is taking on the big players in the industry by producing
dehydrated meals for outdoor adventurers in home compostable
packaging.
The company’s founders, Frankie Sanders and Emily Warne,
started making dehydrated meals out of necessity. Keen
climbers, mountain bikers and trampers, the pair began cooking
and dehydrating their own meals when they
found there was an almost total lack of tasty,
varied options available for non-meat eaters
like themselves.
“We wanted meals we could look forward to
after a long day in the hills,” says Frankie.
The pair started experimenting with curries,
chilli beans and a non-meat Bolognese.
After giving a few of these meals away to
friends and family, they were soon being
asked to provide more and more as word got
around that, at last, tasty vegetarian fare was
available for adventurers wanting lightweight
meals for their missions.
Despite Emily working full time at the Wānaka
climbing gym and Frankie recovering from
aggressive stage 3 breast cancer, they
launched Local Dehy in 2017.
With the purchase of a small commercial food
trailer (now parked in the driveway of their
Hawea home), Frankie and Emily set to work
cooking small batches of their signature kumara chickpea curry,
spaghetti Bolognese and Mexican chilli beans, initially making
20 meals at a time and delivering them to a Wanaka retail outlet.
Emily says that they were so excited to see their product in the
store window that she nearly cried.
Website orders soon started arriving from outdoor enthusiasts
around the country looking for vegan and vegetarian meals. The
pair increased capacity, expanded their dinner options to include
Cajun jambalaya, Thai green curry and leek and lentil stew, and
launched a range of vegan porridges and a hummus selection.
Initially these meals were sold in traditional foil packaging, but
Frankie admits that she never felt comfortable with the idea of
foil bags ending up in landfills. After two years of searching for
an alternative, they found Econic, a Hamilton-based company
specialising in home compostable packaging.
“It’s so awesome to finally be able to offer a sustainable
alternative for outdoor adventurers,” says Frankie. “Many of
our customers write to tell us they are so happy to have found
a company selling delicious vegan food that has waste-free
packaging. We are stoked.”
At the start of 2022, Local Dehy made the decision to
discontinue offering their meals in single-use foil bags and use
only home-compostable packaging. At the
same time the company made a big push
towards sustainability by auditing their
entire process chain, from the provenance
of ingredients to packaging and shipping.
Adopting the principles of a circular
economy, Frankie and Emily committed to
reduce, reuse, remanufacture and recycle
as much as possible. They offer their
customers reusable container options,
send grain sacks to be upcycled into fence
posts, wash and send all soft plastics
for commercial recycling and recycle
cardboard and tins. “We try to create as
little waste and pollution as possible,” says
Frankie. “We use environmentally friendly
cleaning products to protect our wai, and
even use cellulose-based packaging tape
that is compostable.”
During daytime hours their home’s solar
panels power the food trailer and office,
and they use their electric car to take meal orders into Wānaka
for courier pick up.
As part of the push to reduce emissions from food transport and
to support local farmers, Local Dehy sources as much produce
as they can from New Zealand. Frankie says this all goes hand
in hand with their social and environmental sustainability ethic,
and as a company to uphold kaitiakitanga.
“Caring for our environment means taking responsibility for all
processes in our manufacturing, including what happens to our
product once it leaves us,” says Frankie. “It feels really good to
know we are trying our best to protect Papatūānuku, while also
enabling others to do so.”
For more information about Local Dehy and to order their meals,
visit www.localdehy.co.nz
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