HealthPak's latest innovation means you can trust hyper-local ingredients in guest amenities

Published on Jul 18, 2017

HealthPak has taken a major step forward to ensuring you can trust exactly where all the ingredients in your guest amenities come from.

The company’s recent purchase of a traditional beaten copper still now means they can create their own essential oils and hydrosols to go into ranges of hair and skin products so owners of hotels, motels, B&Bs and guesthouses can have the confidence to tell their visitors precisely where the products were made and which New Zealand ingredients they feature.

The idea for delving into the subject of distillation originally came when a hotel asked HealthPak for the exact Auckland provenance on ingredients in their guest amenities and, says HealthPak General Manager Sales and Marketing Jimi Kennedy-Grant, it became obvious that beyond being confident that they were all sourced in New Zealand, it was tough to pinpoint definitely which region.

“Provenance has always been an issue,” Jimi says. “Because although anyone has been able to claim anything they want when it comes to ingredients, it’s always very difficult to prove. That’s obviously not the case when we make something in our factory, but when we buy something in we often find that proving it’s New Zealand-made is easy but actually proving that Central Otago blackcurrant, say, is actually from Central Otago relies on having a pretty good relationship with you supplier before you can ensure that it’s exactly what they say.

“By having a still and creating our own ingredients, now we don’t have that problem.”

For the moment, Jimi is enjoying testing ingredients and formulations before adding them to their ranges but he’s already been out foraging tea tree from a family plot up near Snells Beach – “it’s rough as guts and has never been sprayed so is perfect to test on” – and has his eye on some puriri that he also wants to experiment on.

“The trick is finding enough time to go out and find the plant material because, again, that’s not something you want to farm out as you want to be able to be completely beholden to the provenance,” Jimi says.

As well as provenance – which is a great way to impress visitors to New Zealand and is something that helps build trust and provides a story with guests – HealthPak’s own distilled essential oils will help create bespoke ranges that can be hyper-local.

“Once we’re making our own essential oils and bottles and caps and we know precisely where the plant material has been sourced, then we’ll be able to make, say, Piha tea tree shampoo,” says Jimi.

“It’s a fun process. And I’m already thinking about planting my own lavender and rosemary as ingredients… and maybe thinking of putting mint and rosemary together for someone.”

By turning into a forager and distiller, Jimi is also helping to keep the costs down for what could otherwise be an expensive process of sourcing provenance-proven ingredients for customised amenities.

“This whole project came from a conversation with a hotel that wanted provenance on some Auckland ingredients and I realised that there’s nothing out there that I can purchase commercially at a sensible rate,” Jimi says.

“Yes we could go to sellers individually but when we’re selling bottle, contents and cap for a matter of cents, it’s not going to work when small suppliers charge $120 a litre or more.

“But once we get the formulations done we’ll be able to have total control over our products and yet another thing that will make us utterly unique.”

For more information on HealthPak’s guest amenities and the work we do to ensure all our products are Kiwi-made and sourced, contact us on +64 9 579 6268, at info@healthpak.co.nz or contact us via the website.