Change It Up – In the second of our new food innovators series with Everybird Coffee, we meet Claire Edwards and Troy Bramley, founders of Tora Collective, the little fisheries company fighting to keep Aotearoa’s finest kaimoana on our shores.
A problem of quality
“Sourcing crayfish was always a problem for restaurants,” says Sam Clark, the owner and chef at Central Fire Station in Napier, “Why is it so expensive? Why is it always frozen? Why is it always broken?”. These questions baffle many New Zealanders, but the answer is painfully simple: the majority of our crayfish, pāua, and kina are caught on behalf of large corporations and shipped overseas. What’s left, the damaged, the sickly, and those deemed too weak to survive the journey to China, are sold on the domestic market at export prices. This is the problem that Claire Edwards and Troy Bramley of Tora Collective set out to solve.
Troy had been a crayfishman on the wild, windswept Wairarapa coast for years, fishing for the export market as his father had done before him. When he and Claire got together, they started talking about the fishing industry, about how almost all of our best kaimoana was being exported, how there was no crayfish or pāua on our restaurant menus, and what that meant for Aotearoa’s culinary culture. They asked each other, “What can we do?”
The couple hatched a plan to start a company that supplied hand-caught pāua, kina, and crays directly to restaurants and consumers. To do that, they had to think differently. They took the orders first and collected only what they needed from the ocean. This meant no land-based holding tanks and, most importantly, no waste.
“We had to change our customers’ behaviour.” explains Claire. That meant sending out weekly fishing plans that allowed consumers and restaurants to place their orders in advance.
Troy, who skippers their eight-metre catamaran, the Tākitimu, is passionate about the catch-to-order model: “It’s a huge sustainability push.”
Troy and Claire on the beach at Tora
“It’s one thing to be green in your own whare”
Business models aside, it’s their refusal to compromise on their principles that sets Tora Collective apart from most professional fishers.
When they first started out, they got hate mail from environmentally minded recreational fishers who mistook them for another green-washing fisheries giant. Claire and Troy engaged with them online and assured them that they agreed with them, that they shared their values. “Eventually they’d see what we were about. Then they’d ask us for a job.”
Claire and Troy were adamant they wanted to be as green as possible. They didn’t want to use polystyrene to ship their catch, so they couldn’t use the standard couriers.
For the first few months that meant getting the catch in by 4am then hitting the road. They’d get to Taupō, make a couple of deliveries, take a nap on the side of the road, then carry on to Auckland. “It was a great way of getting to know the chefs”, jokes Claire.
Troy and Claire still go above and beyond both in and out of the water. They harvest beach cast seaweed to use as insulation and protection for the crays, pāua, and kina in transit. They make their own fully compostable ice packs. They fish seasonally to allow stocks to replenish despite being under no legal obligation to do so. They don’t take female crays who can carry up to 500,000 eggs. And they take nothing from the ocean that hasn’t already been ordered.
Claire harvesting kelp off the beach to protect the kai in transit
Fruits of our labour, fruits of the sea
Despite all the hard graft Troy and Claire find real joy in their work. There is a passion for the ocean and all that lives in it that underwrites everything they do, and slowly but surely, people are recognising their worth.
Troy credits their wins at the Outstanding New Zealand Food Producer Awards in 2021 as ‘a real push’, and the list of restaurants they supply reads like a who’s who of the New Zealand culinary scene.
In the long-term, Claire and Troy are determined to lead by example. That means influencing the local fishers around the Wairarapa coast to put back female crayfish and, most importantly, to fish seasonally to allow stocks to replenish.
Troy looks at the big picture. “People only think about the health of the ocean in a generational sense. They see things in terms of ‘oh well things are better than they were ten years ago so everything’s fine’. But what about fifty and hundred years ago? People used to catch groper off the beach here; that hasn’t been heard of for 30 years. 100 years ago people were collecting potfuls of crays, going into the shallows, ankle deep and getting pāua. I’d like to get to the point where the fishers and the government are thinking in those terms.”
Freshly caught cray
To New Zealanders who care about the country’s culinary culture, the fact that Tora are keeping the best of our kaimoana on these shores is almost as important as their environmental credentials.
For a chef like Sam Clark who grew up on the coast eating crayfish and loves sharing the best of Aotearoa’s cuisine with his customers, Tora are a godsend.
“There’s just nothing else like it.”
All photos courtesy of Claire Edwards
The Change It Up series is proudly sponsored by Everybird Drink it black, with milk, mylk or sugar – Everybird coffee is a versatile drop that’s best enjoyed however you like it. Certified Fairtrade, organic and climate neutral, it feels as good as it tastes, and it’s now available at Supie.
