Little Beauties is a family business in Nelson creating joy with their speciality air-dried fruit snacks.
They supply supermarkets, specialty stores, online and overseas consumers with delicious and unique air-dried fruit snacks crafted using fresh New Zealand fruit.
From dried gold kiwifruit slices to dried feijoa sours, their delicious range of snacks is now stocked by 200 stores across New Zealand. They are also gaining international attention and are now exporting to a growing number of discerning customers in Australia, North America, and Japan.
The challenge
Maintain quality with operational efficiency
Rob Simcic and the team at Little Beauties are proud to produce the “world’s most delightful fruit snacks” since 2018. They are one of New Zealand’s first companies to make use of superficially blemished fruit, crafting it into delicious and nutritious snacks using advanced drying processes and technology.
To achieve their trademark taste and live up to their promise of excellences, they required a high-quality air flow dehydrator able to produce high volumes without sacrificing food quality.
Little Beauties was in search of a versatile dehydrator to scale up production, test new products, and give them the temperature and air flow controls they required to create the growing variety of snacks they were producing. They completed trials at Dry Solutions facility and found the results from the Rexmoi® Air Tray Dehydrator to be exactly what they required.
Operational efficiency was a necessity to meet the growing number of Kiwis buying online, as well as the increasing number of domestic and international customers making a beeline for its products.
The solution
Scaling up production with two Rexmoi® Air Flow Dryers
In just four years, Little Beauties had grown from a local business to an international player, and the need to scale up was clear. Adding more dehydrators to meet production was the next step and they were introduced to New Zealand dehydrating specialists Drying Solutions and their top quality Rexmoi® food dryers.
Little Beauties made the decision to trial a Rexmoi® food dryer on a short-term lease and their production capacity and efficiency increased significantly.
Even more importantly, the Rexmoi® dryer’s “gold standard” temperature and airflow controls, allowed Little Beauties to air dry its cornerstone gold kiwifruit product in a way that enhanced its flavour profile while preserving nutritional value.
The Rexmoi® food dryer unit also runs on electricity, providing a sustainable solution without sacrificing quality. With 85 per cent of New Zealand’s electricity generated from renewable resources, this was important for the company’s sustainability objectives.
As a result of the benefits they saw during the lease of a unit, Little Beauties decided to purchase two Rexmoi® food dryer units as permanent fixtures in its Nelson production facility.
The results
Increased production with a sustainable solution
Purchasing two Rexmoi® food dryers has allowed Little Beauties to scale up to meet demand while maintaining product quality. They currently process over two hundred tonnes of air-dried gold kiwifruit product per year, with significant increases planned for the years ahead, and are able to scale up further as demand continues to grow.
The Rexmoi® food dryer’s advanced temperature and air flow controls is allowing Little Beauties to experiment with new approaches and recipes, in a way they could never have done with older air flow dehydrating units of the past.
The Little Beauties story has just begun, and they have big plans over the coming years. The Rexmoi® food dryers is right at the heart of these plans, which include development of some exciting and pioneering new snack options which they hope to bring to the market in the near future.
Thanks to the Rexmoi® food dryer and a strong relationship with Drying Solutions, Little Beauties is well positioned to scale up when the opportunity for worldwide growth once again comes knocking.
“The Rexmoi® Air Flow Dryer is incredibly consistent and incredibly reliable. Innovation is at the heart of our business and it’s important to us to be able to support innovation in other New Zealand companies as well.”
– Rob Simcic, CEO, Little Beauties