New Zealand exports some of the world's best seafood. So why aren't we canning it?

If you want to buy some of the world’s best tinned fish, you’ll probably end up reaching for a product from Portugal or Spain.

Maybe you’d ask why New Zealand doesn’t have premium tinned fish, since the country produces and exports vast amounts of world-class seafood.

Then, after a hunt around, you’d be scratching your head and ask: “Wait a minute - New Zealand doesn’t make any tinned fish?”

And that’s where the story would end for most of us.

It turns out plenty of people have thought about doing it, and after looking into it discovered a thicket of regulations, expensive machinery and food safety requirements, and promptly abandoned the idea of tinned fish.

Enter Josephine and Hillary Sharp, who decided this was the perfect part-time project. It helps that neither sister appears particularly good at taking no for an answer.

“We’re pretty f****** stubborn, to be honest,” Josephine says with a laugh.

Throughout the interview, Josephine and Hillary’s answers often arrived in two pieces. One sister would start a sentence and the other would finish it. The company is very clearly a family affair.

Raised in a family of manufacturers and problem-solvers, they grew up around machinery, prototypes and an engineer father who preferred to invent solutions when they came along.

Josephine spent a decade in the New Zealand Navy. Hillary runs a manufacturing business producing medical devices and veterinary pharmaceutical products.

So, when food manufacturers, regulations and costs began throwing up obstacles, instead of looking for the exit, they found solutions.

And now they’re on the precipice of achieving their audacious, financially questionable and utterly delicious goal.

Their company, TINNiES Fish Co, is set to be the only tinned fish made in New Zealand, and they’re just in time for the zeitgeist.

Around the world, premium conservas have become fashionable in recent years, but Spain and Portugal have been refining the art of tinned seafood for generations.

The Sharp sisters have developed a range of New Zealand tinned sardines featuring locally inspired flavours. Photo / Jason Dorday

Rebecca Smidt, co-owner of Auckland restaurant Cazador, said the Mediterranean countries remain the global benchmark for quality.

“The reason it is so good is that it is a tradition there to preserve fish, and it’s become a real source of pride because they use the very best ingredients,” Smidt says. ” It’s sort of the opposite of the new world approach.”

Rather than treating tinned fish as a lower-value product, producers in Spain and Portugal often reserve premium seafood for canning, with an emphasis on careful sourcing, hand-processing and presentation.

“Little old ladies do it in Spain and Portugal,” Smidt said. “It’s quite a skill.”

In much of the English-speaking world, however, tinned fish developed a very different reputation. Rather than a delicacy, it became a commodity.

Low-cost fish processed at scale, packed as efficiently as possible and sold as an inexpensive pantry staple that occasionally resembles cat food.

But that perception is changing. Particularly in the United States, brightly illustrated tins, premium ingredients and small-batch production have entered the mainstream.

A new generation of consumers has rediscovered sardines and other preserved seafood through a European lens, treating tinned fish less as emergency food and more as an affordable luxury.

A label on some vintage New Zealand tinned fish. Photo / Russel Museum

As the Sharp sisters sat at home eating sardines, they watched that shift unfold overseas and found themselves asking themselves why aren’t we doing the same thing here?

“New Zealand has the best seafood in the world. Why are we not eating our own tinned seafood?” Hillary Sharp said.

They soon discovered why.

Learning to can fish

At first glance, putting fish in a tin sounds simple.

You catch fish. You add oil. You seal the tin.

Not quite.

In reality, the process requires specialist equipment, food safety expertise and months of learning.

When they started, they imagined outsourcing much of the process. Instead, Josephine has become something of a specialist at processing whole sardines by hand.

“She’s really good at it,” Hillary said. “I don’t do that.”

Heads come off. Tails come off. Fish are packed into tins by hand.

Once the tins hit the shelves, TINNiES will be the only tinned fish made in New Zealand. Photo / Jason Dorday

Each tin is then vacuum-sealed using a specialised seaming machine imported from overseas.

On a good day they can seal a tin in about 15 seconds.

On a slower day, closer to 20.

The fish are sourced through Wild Fish, a family-run operation in Warkworth. They arrive frozen before being processed, packed and prepared for cooking.

The plan was to have a contract manufacturer handle much of the work.

The sisters were so eager to get started they spent thousands of dollars air-freighting their seaming machine to New Zealand.

Then the arrangement unravelled.

The manufacturer raised concerns about the equipment, production timelines stretched out and the sisters found themselves searching for another way forward.

Instead of shelving the idea, they took on the work themselves.

The challenge isn’t the fish

The sisters then discovered that putting fish into a tin is just the start.

The real challenge is producing something that can sit safely on a shelf for years.

Creating a commercially canned food product requires extensive (and expensive) validation and testing.

Fish must be heated to temperatures of about 120C, high enough to eliminate harmful bacteria and parasites while also producing the right texture and quality.

For sardines, it also helps soften the bones.

The validation work involves identifying cold spots, monitoring heat penetration and proving every tin is reaching the required temperature.

The sisters estimate the process will cost about $20,000.

“That was the part that was like, ‘Oh s***, are we even going to be able to do this?’”

Commercial-scale canning brings further complications.

The industrial retort, a pressure-cooking vessel used to cook and sterilise the product, is described by the sisters as like cooking with a “bomb”.

Can New Zealanders be convinced?

The final question is perhaps the simplest and most important.

Will people buy it?

The sisters plan to sell their sardines for about $10 a tin.

That is considerably more than a standard supermarket can, but still below many of the premium imported tins they view as competitors.

They are currently taking samples to food events and gathering feedback on flavours, packaging and pricing before committing to larger production runs.

It is an attempt to answer another important question before investing heavily in scaling up.

Do the fish actually taste good?

The sisters are confident they do.

They are unapologetic about trying to offer something different from the products many New Zealanders grew up eating.

The chilli crisp is quite spicy. Photo / Jason Dorday

Too much of the domestic market, they argue, has traditionally been dominated by fish packed in water, soya oil or tomato sauce.

“The bar is pretty low,” they said.

Months of experimentation eventually produced three launch flavours: classic olive oil, a punchy chilli crisp and a luxurious butter and horopito, a native spice with a peppery kick.

Whether consumers agree will become clear soon enough.

For now, both sisters continue to work fulltime jobs while building TINNiES around the edges of their lives.

There are larger production runs to organise, food safety hurdles to clear and no guarantee New Zealanders will embrace a $10 tin of sardines.

What seems certain is that the Sharp sisters are unlikely to be deterred by the difficulty.

After all, that is partly how they got here.

“If someone says no,” they said, “we’re like, no one else is going to do it. We’re going to do it.”