Meet Our Makers: Cam Bignell of Eden Orchards

Cam Bignell is the General Manager of Eden Orchards, a functional beverage family business from New Zealand.

With the equivalent of two kilos of fruit in every bottle, these luminous drinks are really something special. They both lovingly grow and intercept cosmetically blemished produce destined for landfill to make ultra potent juices from cherries, blueberries, raspberries and more.

With one hundred percent fruit and nothing added, Eden Orchards juices are superfoods, cocktail enhancers, afternoon spritzes and everyday staples in one, and with evidence-based benefits like better sleep, faster workout recovery, increased metabolism and reduced inflammation.

C&C: Hi Cam! Can you tell us a bit about the early days of Eden Orchards? Where did the idea come from and how did the business get started?

Cam: Sure! So my family have been growing cherries for over thirty years - we grew up on a cherry orchard, selling cherries at markets. As part of that, we saw that there was a large number of cherries that weren’t sellable because they had scratches on them. They were just perfectly ripe, but they wouldn’t last to get to a supermarket shelf or a market in a different town. We thought ‘well, let’s juice these’ because cherries had all of these great health benefits.

We always had better sleeps over the summer because of cherries - they’ve got lots of melatonin. We realised that we could use this imperfect fruit to make another product. We tried a whole lot of different products, but we settled on a pure juice so that people could get those health benefits and the flavour all year round.

C&C: The juice is made from 100% pure New Zealand grown fruit and is not from concentrate. Can you tell us a bit about this and why it’s important to Eden Orchards that the juice is not from concentrate?

Cam: Our whole business is focussed on trying to retain as much of the benefits of the cherries as they would have from fresh. We make all of our juice in the summertime when the cherries are fresh - we don’t use frozen fruit - and we use a process called ‘flash pasteurisation’, which retains as much of these benefits as possible.

We create a pure juice because in order to concentrate a juice, you have to basically put it through another process that cooks it and removes the water content. A concentrate has more processing than our pure juice does, so we want to limit the amount of processing that happens to the product because that limits the loss of good things - vitamins, minerals, antioxidants.

A concentrate is basically made by cooking the fruit down to a concentrate and then reconstituting it by adding water back in and then pasteurising it again before you put it in a bottle. So anything that is from concentrate has been processed three or four times.

C&C: What has the process of getting Eden Orchards ‘on the shelf’ and into retailers been like?

Cam: It’s a tough process. We found that people in New Zealand didn’t know the benefits of cherries as well as the people in Australia did. We had to build the brand from the consumer up, so we had to go to lots of markets and trade shows and educate customers. We’ve had to educate customers regarding the benefits of cherries and our other products like blueberry, peach and kiwifruit juice. 

The process of actually getting the bottle on the shelf is very tough, because if you go into a store there’s thousands of different products and they don’t want thousands of different brands to approach them every day - they would prefer to go through a distributor. We found that we needed to work with a distributor in Australia to get on the shelf. 

C&C: In the process of getting the products ‘on the shelf’, why did you choose to work with a distributor and why did you ultimately choose to work with Cartel & Co?

Cam: Firstly, we chose a distributor because I started travelling around Australia, knocking on doors and going into health food shops to try to get the product on shelf myself. They liked the product, but they didn’t want to deal directly with me because that means thousands of invoices to settle and order every month just to get all of their products on the shelves. So they wanted a distributor, which led me to look for them.

I found Cartel & Co and it was just great. The reason we wanted to go with Cartel & Co was because the people behind the brand are real people, we actually get on well with them and have a good time doing business together. They obviously care about the companies that go with them, they’re true to their word and they’re just nice people. They’ve got good connections with the customers and they’re good at dealing with their suppliers as well. 

C&C: If I was brand new to the Eden Orchards world, which product would you recommend that I try first?

Cam: The cherry juice, it’s the crowd favourite. It’s our hero product because it is quite special - cherries are only around for one to two months a year, so there’s not many real cherry flavoured things out there. There’s a lot of fake cherry flavour that you get in cough syrup and that sort of thing - it’s not the same and the cherry juice has the more immediate health benefits. 

So you drink the cherry juice and you have a deeper sleep, or it helps with inflammation or muscle recovery. It’s quite an immediate benefit, rather than some of the other fruits like blueberries which are really high in antioxidants, but they don’t give you that immediate effect. 

C&C: What do you envision for the future of Eden Orchards as a brand?

Cam: We really want to be a leader in functional beverages in Australia and New Zealand. This is not just with our cherry juice, but with a range of different products - launching other flavours and utilising other imperfect fruit in New Zealand. 

Essentially, we want to eliminate fruit waste in New Zealand by becoming a leading functional beverage brand. We will always use locally grown fruit - we won’t be importing - and we will try to solve the fruit waste issue. 

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