From our farm to fork feature

Service Foods, one of New Zealand’s largest independent food distribution businesses, is a family success story like no other.

The company’s roots lay in Christchurch, where Service Foods founder Stan Balar had bought a small grocery store on Colombo Street with his wife Vicki in the early 1980s after emigrating from India.

The store, which then was little more than a dairy with just a few employees, has evolved into a food service company with 16 branches, more than 200 temperature-controlled trucks, and over 750 employees.

It all began with specialty spices in the early 1990s, Service Foods South Island general manager Troydon Lill explains.

“There weren’t many food places around in the nineties, so Stan started getting requests from the Indian community wanting spices from their homeland.

“So he started importing them and became a wholesaler.”

In 1994, Balar Wholesale Supplies was established, later becoming Service Foods and beginning the company’s slow, steady growth trajectory.

Much of that growth has been achieved by acquiring existing businesses, allowing Service Foods to be a universal supplier to the food industry.

Lill describes the company as a “supermarket for businesses.”

“In the last seven years, we have bought about 23 businesses and brought them under the Service Foods banner.

“We have to have that distribution network to be able to offer that one-stop-shop service.”

Service Foods supplies a wide range of establishments, from restaurants, cafes, and wineries to hospitals, schools, retirement homes, and cruise ships.

All up, Service Foods supplies more than 10,000 businesses nationwide.

Restaurants range from high-end bespoke dining experiences, such as King of Snake and Inati in Christchurch, to regional smaller cafes and bakeries, such as Amberley Pies.

Key customers include big names such as Domino’s Pizza, Lone Star and Burger Wisconsin.

“We start delivering at 4 am in the morning.

“We are doing around a thousand deliveries daily in Christchurch alone, which is pretty big.”

Some Service Foods clients are in the agricultural sector, such as farms and high country stations, looking to feed staff or agritourism guests.

“Farms may either be going to that tourism market and suddenly have ten or twenty people for dinner.”

Produce can be processed and prepped by Service Foods to client’s specifications.

“We can offer prepared produce where it’s all cut up and ready to go, and they just have to cook it.”

“The quality of produce is really important because if you have confidence in your produce, then chefs will look at your meat as well.”

The emphasis is on quality, fresh and locally sourced products with a farm-to-plate ethos.

“We want to get everything local.

“We use a lot of smaller growers for mushrooms and microgreens.

“For oranges and apples, we only really import when local seasons are coming to an end.”

The product range on offer includes an impressive  4400 dry goods, 450 lines of seafood, 400 produce lines and 674 cuts of meat.

Service Foods delivery trucks travel regionally daily, delivering to areas other distribution businesses miss, including Mt Hutt, Methven, and further South to Fairlie.

“Our trucks are set up to be off-road and navigate gravel driveways.

“There is an opportunity to supply bigger farming stations, particularly when the shearing gang comes in, and you have to feed 20 people.”

Despite the size of the company, Service Foods remains a family-owned and operated business, with Stan Balar still involved in the company in an observatory role and his two sons in leadership positions at an executive level.

“They are a really humble family and have been able to reinvest the profits back in the business to help it grow quickly and expand.

“When it’s your family business, you don’t want it to fail, and you’ll put everything into it.

“They are really passionate,” Lill said.

By Claire Inkson