This article is part of our Supplier Stories series, where we share the people and stories behind the products in our gift boxes.
From Market Stalls to a Growing Kitchen
In New Plymouth, Momo Martin and Michelle Hartley started out by selling pancakes at the local seaside market and supporting various charities at each market. That intentionality of giving back never left the business it grew into Theory Food. Theory Food is now a well-established catering business, with a focus on modern and vibrant corporate catering, as well as supplying a number of local cafes in New Plymouth. Four years ago, the pair started selling jarred products such as Kasundi, Sticky Soy glaze and the Reduced Sugar Spread as customers asked for their own batch for home after trying them in their catering orders.
The catering still carries “doing good with food” as its guiding line, and it shows up in every jar of the Reduced Sugar Raspberry and Chia fruit spread we stock in our Tasty Taranaki Gift Box — We Love Local has donated $172.50 since June 2025 by purchasing the reduced sugar spread, making it taste that much better.
A Spread with Half the Sugar and All the Flavour
The Reduced Sugar Raspberry and Chia Fruit Spread carries 50% less sugar than a traditional jam, without losing the full fruit flavour that makes it worth spreading. It comes out of the same New Plymouth kitchen that supplies Theory Food’s corporate catering and wholesale food items, and where their charity, the Eat a Rainbow Foundation also prepares its meals from.
Feeding More Than Just Customers
Theory Food supports the Eat a Rainbow Foundation, which Momo and Michelle established in 2021 after the business could not operate as caterers during the COVID lockdowns. Through community support, they donated 1129 frozen premade meals to people who needed them most, and that experience shaped what came next. Now, 5% of corporate catering revenue goes to the foundation, which supplies nourishing premade meals to nine local charity partners, including families in emergency housing and children receiving treatment at Taranaki Base Hospital.
Theory Food has won the TSB Taranaki Chamber of Commerce Small Business Excellence Award and Hospitality Excellence Award, both in 2022, along with the Kiwibank Local Hero Award in 2021.
Taranaki, In Every Box
- Region: Taranaki
- Location: New Plymouth
- Product we stock: Reduced Sugar Raspberry and Chia Fruit Spread
- Find it in: Tasty Taranaki Gift Box
You will find Theory Food’s reduced sugar spread in our Tasty Taranaki Gift Box, alongside fellow Taranaki makers Malva Chocolate and MK Spice. If you are looking for a corporate gift that gives back the way its maker does, this is the kind of product that earns its place in the box.
