When more than 10,000 food lovers gather at Paraparaumu’s Mazengarb Reserve this weekend to bask in the tastes and aromas of decadent fresh food, the Kāpiti Food Fair will deliver its usual end-of-year buzz.

More than 220 vendors will saute, stir and pour their way through the annual start-of-summer event, which has placed the coast on the radar as one of New Zealand’s top foodie destinations.

Fifteen years after launching as a humble 50-vendor community event, built on a love of local food, the Kāpiti Food Fair is thriving more than ever thanks to two hard-working mums and event owners, Helene Judge and Jeanine van Kradenburg.

“Every year after the food fair ends, I say, ‘I’m done — I’m finished,’ because it’s a lot of work. But by February I’m into it again after one meeting with Helene!” laughs Jeanine, who co-created the event as a cheffing student at Whitireia Polytechnic in 2008. “I’m like, ‘Okay. I can do this again,’ and we get straight into pulling together big applications for funding.”

When qualified nurse Jeanine stepped into the hospitality industry to train as a chef at 40, shortly before starting the Kāpiti Food Fair, the mother of three envisioned having a career she could easily juggle with parenthood.

“I thought about what I could do to be an available local mum and so I did the chefs course, which is when my class and I went to a Wellington culinary fair and I thought about the fact Kāpiti didn’t have its own,” recalls Jeanine, who registered as a nurse in South Africa during 1989, before moving to New Zealand with her GP husband.

“A small team and I, including fellow cheffing student Tony Gan, decided to start one and the timing was perfect because there was an advertisement in the newspaper from Kāpiti Coast District Council. It said they had a little grant available for community initiatives, but the catch was we had three days to apply!”

After scurrying to pull together ideas and a business plan, Jeanine and her team made the application and met with council representatives, who granted them $3000 that went directly into marketing.

“We started with Whitireia campus as the venue and the fair was held in the classrooms and courtyard, so we didn’t have to worry about the weather,” recalls Jeanine, who works as a nurse at Waikanae Health.

“Back then, food licensing regulations were very strict if you wanted to do anything from home and you had to have a separate kitchen. With any commercial selling of food, there were lots of hoops to jump through.”

Despite it being challenging for Jeanine and her team, their first-ever event was a success and welcomed around 4000 visitors, and so they agreed to make the Kāpiti Food Fair an annual occurrence.

A year later, Jeanine opened the business PartyPerfect Catering, running it from home. Very quickly, her venture exploded and its success meant she needed to hire more and more staff. After 10 years running the catering company, alongside the fair, PartyPerfect was sold to Anzil in 2019.

From the 90s until 2006, Helene was working as director of professional development at the Institute of Chartered Accountants in Wellington, 40 minutes from her now-business partner and good friend.

When she tired of her role in the corporate grind, realising she wanted to become a mother, Helene underwent a three-year in vitro fertilisation (IVF) journey to welcome her only son, Sidney, who is now at college.

“I was older at 41 and Sidney was a hard boy to conceive, and we’re very close,” shares the dedicated mum, whose parenting journey very quickly went off the track she’d planned. “When he was a small baby, I had to escape my ex’s home in Wellington and leave everything behind bar Sidney’s belongings, my immediate belongings, and my computer and jewellery. I came to be near my sister in Kāpiti, where I’d bought a little house in Paraparaumu Beach.”

Helene started a new life on the coast with her son, navigating years as a victim in the Family Court, including a stage where she represented herself because she couldn’t afford a lawyer. But determined to “put food on the table”, the hard-working businesswoman became a sole trader in 2012, as Kāpiti Business Projects, gathering a variety of contracts and eventually managing to pay off her mortgage thanks to resilience through adversity.

“What was really important for us was to build a life in the community of Kāpiti, and we loved it,” she shares. “We still love being here, and it has been Sidney’s home since he was 4 months old. You do what you need to as a mother and that’s the reality of it.”

When Helene agreed to get on board with the Kāpiti Food Fair 13 years ago, original members had withdrawn from the event because of other commitments.

“I was working as a business development manager at Nature Coast Enterprise, which no longer exists, and Jeanine and the team came in to see how I could connect and help them,” Helene recalls. “That’s initially how I stepped in and became involved.”

While the fair didn’t run in 2011, it picked up again in 2012 at Lindale Village with a live cooking demonstration from television personality Nadia Lim, who’d just won Masterchef New Zealand. Her attendance kicked off a year-on-year tradition that saw celebrity chefs front the Kāpiti Food Fair. In 2014, the same year sisters Karena and Kasey Bird won the Masterchef series, they visited as stars of the event.

Since then, the pop-up extravaganza has evolved into a commercially viable foodie’s paradise that’s packed with entertainment. For the first time this Saturday, December 2, an outdoor evening concert will follow the daytime event, starting from 6.45pm and showcasing Canadian-born Kiwi country songstress Tami Nielson.

Jeanine credits her business partner for the newest event highlight, for which 3000 tickets have been released. She pinpoints Helene’s multitasking skills for holding together and growing the fair year after year, including its budget, which includes a $30,000 grant from the Kāpiti Major Events Fund.

“Council formulated the Major Events Fund in 2015 and Jeanine and I were too scared to apply in that first year because we were two chicks who thought, ‘Well, we don’t know whether they’ve got a lot of confidence in what we’re doing’,” Helene admits. “But when we saw the people who were successful in receiving funding, we thought, ‘This is silly! We meet the criteria’, and so we applied and were successful.”

Encouraged to formalise their business beyond just having a bank account, the women set up as a private partnership that year and secured a GST number and accountant.

“We knew a lot already, but it kind of gave us the permission to have confidence in what we were doing,” recalls Helene, who is excited to bring people together again from 10am to 4pm at Mazengarb Reserve, Paraparaumu.

“We have a lot of experience, get on well, and just make things happen.”

Until last year, the women have been breaking even from their hard work – but they finally profited from the 2022 event. However, the money was quickly wiped by a Covid loan they received after the 2020 lockdown, which they were asked to pay back just weeks after last year’s fair.

Fortunately, when the Government created the Domestic Events Fund, Helene and Jeanine applied and became the only major event in Kāpiti to receive money. The support allowed them to step up as music promoters for the fair, which also has a strong sustainability focus, as well as free children’s entertainment and entry.

“Helene does almost all of the organising, but I think I’m a pretty good sounding board,” quips Jeanine, whose business partner describes her as a massive calming and balancing influence. “We talk a lot at night about the event and work really well together. We couldn’t do this every year without each other.”