Business Is Boring

Business is Boring is a weekly podcast series presented by The Spinoff in association with Callaghan Innovation. Host Simon Pound speaks with innovators and commentators focused on the future of New Zealand. This week he’s joined by Foodprint founder and CEO Michal Garvey.

Food waste is such a massive problem that it’s hard to fully comprehend. Everyone would have heard the stats that say more than a third of food, fruit and vegetables are wasted, and one of the many causes is the struggle to accurately match supply to demand. Cafes and food sellers will fill a cabinet and hope with the best intentions, and the last thing they want to do is waste that food, but if people don’t buy those fresh items they don’t have much of a shelf life.

This week’s guest, Michal Garvey, saw the beginning of a solution to this while living and working in Sweden, and came back to New Zealand with the goal of helping to make the food industry more sustainable while at the same time giving customers access to heavily discounted food. The app, Foodprint, is an ingenious way for great cafes and food makers like &sushi, Ripe and Bluebells Cakery to list items for half price and ensure they sell everything through. It helps give people great food for less, measures carbon saved and cuts down the upsetting waste.

To talk about the journey, the uptake and what’s next, Foodprint founder and CEO Michal Garvey joined Business is Boring for a chat.

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You’ve probably stood in a supermarket queue and thought you could be spending your short time on this earth more productively. That’s what happened to this week’s Business is Boring guest, William Chomley, who instead of shrugging off these musings started a company to solve the problem.

IMAGR is a New Zealand start-up that uses computer vision to power smart shopping carts, with the ultimate goal of removing check outs, meaning grocery store customers never have to queue again. 

William Chomley was working in an investment fund and didn’t have time to wait in supermarket lines, but he did find the time to build out and validate the concept of solving the problem. His company went from side-hustle to more than full-time, raising multiple investment rounds including $14 million dollars this year in a round led by Japanese tech giant Toshiba.

IMAGR are now working on delivering the shopping experience of the future in Japan and Auckland, with a team of hardware and software experts solving a problem that Amazon and Alibaba have spent billions on.

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This is episode one of Coming Home, a new five-part podcast series from The Spinoff podcast network, in partnership with Kiwibank. We're sharing it with you here because we think if you like Business is Boring you might find this interesting too. Have a listen and subscribe on your platform of choice to hear the rest of the series. New episodes arriving weekly.

Coming Home delves into the phenomenon of high achieving New Zealanders returning to Aotearoa in the era of Covid-19. Join hosts Duncan Greive and Jane Yee as they seek to find out who these returnees are, why they left New Zealand in the first place, the reasons for their homecoming and what their arrival means for all of us. Featuring Peter Gordon, Julia Arnott-Neenee, Paul Spoonley, Jarrod Kerr, Rachel Morris, Joel Kefali, Polly Fryer and Mahoney Turnbull.

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Business is Boring is a weekly podcast series presented by The Spinoff in association with Callaghan Innovation. Host Simon Pound speaks with innovators and commentators focused on the future of New Zealand. This week he’s joined by Lisa King from AF Drinks.

As a society, we don’t have a particularly healthy relationship with alcohol. We work hard to ignore the fact alcohol is a serious carcinogen, and even harder to ignore the social and medical effects and costs of drinking. If we thought about that when people say they’re not drinking, we’d recognise that’s probably the better idea – but it’s not like that yet. 

This week’s guest should be well known to regular listeners of the podcast, having been on before as the founder of Eat My Lunch. Lisa King decided to take a break from drinking earlier this year, and the weird reactions that prompted from people led her to reevaluate her and our general relationship with drinking.

Now she’s helping amplify the conversation about changing our relationship to drinking, and helping make it easier to take control of your choices, with her new venture AF Drinks. The first products are alcohol-free gin and tonics that actually taste good, and they’re hitting supermarkets everywhere shortly.

To talk about saving non-drinkers from horrible warm orange juice, starting an alcohol free drinks company and the reaction and reception so far, Lisa King joined Business is Boring for a chat.

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Business is Boring is a weekly podcast series presented by The Spinoff in association with Callaghan Innovation. Host Simon Pound speaks with innovators and commentators focused on the future of New Zealand. This week he’s joined by Nada Piatek, co-founder and MD of Again Again.

Every year, New Zealanders throw out 300 million takeaway coffee cups. Even the ones that are compostable, most often aren’t composted – only one in 400 compostable coffee cups make it to the compost, in fact.Many people have Keep Cups, but not everyone always has their Keep Cup on them at all times. And then there aren’t many choices. But one New Zealand company is out to change that.

Again Again offers a service where users can pay $3 to borrow a reusable stainless steel cup with a lid. Bring it back, and you will get your $3 back, with the cafe washing it for future use. It saves cafes money on takeaway cups, and it reduces waste. So far it’s helped remove 840,000 cups from the waste stream each year, and it’s only just getting started.

Again Again began in Wellington, has 160 plus cafes around the country in the program, and is now looking to expand their impact and mission. They’re currently equity crowdfunding through PledgeMe – where they’re looking to raise at least $300k to help them expand to tackle other takeaway waste problems, including an exciting new project with Garage Project around their flagons.

The company co-founder and MD, Nada Piatek joined us by Zoom, for a chat about how 20 years of entrepreneurship and sustainability initiatives led to this concept, the raise and the goals of the company.

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Business is Boring is a weekly podcast series presented by The Spinoff in association with Callaghan Innovation. Host Simon Pound speaks with innovators and commentators focused on the future of New Zealand. This week he’s joined by Morgan Donoghue from InMusic.

Auckland’s Karangahape Rd has long been a home of live music, but it might be news to you that it’s also an internationally recognised hotspot for music software innovation and excellence. It's where InMusic, owner of some of the world’s biggest music brands like Numark, Denon and Akai make their software, while other big brands with offices in the neighbourhood include Serato and Melodics. Today’s guest has a connection to all of them.

Morgan Donoghue was with Serato in key roles during its growth, is an investor in Melodics and is currently the MD at InMusic. On top of all that he’s also the COO for a very interesting new earphone technology company called Nura, who use software to create personalised audio experiences for listeners. Nura hit the news recently for a deal with the All Blacks, where the team took equity in the company in return for a sponsorship deal – a novel and interesting business approach.

It’s just the latest step in a long and varied career in music for Donoghue, who before these roles acted as the head of global music for Vodafone and manager of Hollie Smith along with his wife Nicky. He joined Business is Boring this week to tell a few of the many amazing yarns he’s got from his time in the music industry, and talk about the All Blacks deal, his many different roles and how to make New Zealand music tech sing.

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Business is Boring is a weekly podcast series presented by The Spinoff in association with Callaghan Innovation. Host Simon Pound speaks with innovators and commentators focused on the future of New Zealand. This week he’s joined by Jo Mills, co-founder of Fuel50.

The world of work has obviously changed a lot recently, making many of the HR processes employers and employees use increasingly unfit for purpose. With the rise of the gig economy, people changing careers, new ways of working and a growing understanding of the value of people bringing their whole selves to work, the traditional approach of a strict job description, set hours and a once yearly review are quite out of date, yet still being used. 

One company out to change that is Fuel50, founded by Jo Mills and Anne Fulton – two New Zealanders working to help some of the biggest US companies with their people strategy. Their AI-powered software allows for all the permutations of shifting projects, personnel and interests, matching up people to work and creating new ways to allow managers and team members to shape their careers and lives in the best way for all. 

The company is at the forefront of a lot of the conversations you might have heard about agile working and work-life balance and all the other good new things. To discuss this, the future of work, making it in the US from NZ and an upcoming spot on Southern SaaS – the excellent SaaS conference for local stars – co-founder Jo Mills joined Business is Boring for a chat.

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Business is Boring is a weekly podcast series presented by The Spinoff in association with Callaghan Innovation. Host Simon Pound speaks with innovators and commentators focused on the future of New Zealand. This week he’s joined by Hengjie Wang and Alliv Samson, co-founders of Kami.

If you have any school-aged kids in your life, you’ll know all about the changes and fast-adoption of technology the education sector has seen this year. During lockdown us parents had what seemed like endless repetitive problems with Google slides, things not saving, appearing or formatting properly and generally just not working. 

But one New Zealand-based education tool has taken a bunch of these frustrations and made it easy to collaborate, annotate, work and see what others are doing in a shared online workspace. The app is called Kami – which means paper in Japanese – and it’s helping create a shared learning environment for millions of kids and adults around the world. 

The app is now used in more than one in three schools in the US. They are closing in on 20 million users worldwide, and you might have seen them in the news as they recently made an offer for all New Zealand schools to be able to use it for free for the foreseeable future. 

Kami was launched by three final year students at the University of Auckland, co-founders who picked up a chairman and a business plan through an entrepreneur challenge, and have now built the business into a global force in the highly controlled and highly contested education space. 

To talk about the journey, running the business over lockdown with a new baby, and what’s next, co-founders Hengjie Wang and Alliv Samson joined Business is Boring this week for a chat.

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Business is Boring is a weekly podcast series presented by The Spinoff in association with Callaghan Innovation. Host Simon Pound speaks with innovators and commentators focused on the future of New Zealand. This week he’s joined by Josh Emett, Michelin-starred chef and restaurant owner.

Josh Emett is a household name in New Zealand, famous for having worked and won Michelin stars with Gordon Ramsay over more than a decade, before coming home to open a string of successful restaurants and find fame as a judge on Masterchef. 

You may have visited his restaurants Madam Woo, or Hawker and Roll, or Rata, or Ostro, or read his cookbook of collected greatest hits, The Recipe, or seen his Instagram videos with his sons helping as sous chefs in the home kitchen.

All his other restaurants to date have been partnerships, but this year he decided to take over Waiheke luxury boutique hotel and restaurant The Oyster Inn and open a new restaurant, Onslow, from scratch with his wife Helen.

What’s it been like for them to take on so much solo risk in a year where running a restaurant has hardly been plain sailing, then doubling down with a fine dining venture? To talk about his career, how he got to where he is and what he's doing next, Josh Emett joined Business is Boring for a chat just two days out from the opening of Onslow.

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Business is Boring is a weekly podcast series presented by The Spinoff in association with Callaghan Innovation. Host Simon Pound speaks with innovators and commentators focused on the future of New Zealand. This week he’s joined by Simon Farrell-Green, founder of Here magazine.

This podcast has always had a special interest in the ways people have managed to keep making things happen in business while the world seems to be falling apart around them. This week’s guest did just that when he crowdfunded and launched a new magazine title during a time of supreme uncertainty, when magazines were effectively banned in New Zealand.

Simon Farrell-Green will be familiar to many listeners from his years of food reviews and feature writing for Metro, bfm, Eat Here Now, Kia Ora and as editor of Home. When Home’s publisher Bauer Media folded in the early days of the Covid-19 pandemic, Simon wasted little time in launching a new title of his own, with the backing of a successful Boosted campaign.

The magazine, Here, is a colourful and fun celebration of the magazine format that acts as a time capsule of design and these times. With the second issue out now, Simon joined Business is Boring to talk about the journey.

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