Why we dried the citrus (and not the syrup).
When you tell people you're starting a cocktail-adjacent NZ food brand, everyone's first guess is "oh, are you doing a syrup?" There's a reason: cocktail syrups are a well-trodden category. Six Barrel built a great business on them. Curious Cocktail. Strangelove out of Aussie. The format is proven, the price points are stable, and the audience knows what to do with the bottle.
We thought about it. Then we kept walking past the same problem in every bar we drank in: half the prep time was citrus, and most of the cost was waste. A bartender doesn't lose sleep over running out of cocktail syrup, Six Barrel will overnight it. They lose sleep over the fresh-fruit run, the brown lemon wheels on a Friday night, the porter who forgot the limes, the negroni garnish that's already weeping by the second sip.
That's a garnish problem. Not a syrup problem.
The hidden maths
Take a 60-cover cocktail bar. They go through, generously, four fresh lemons a night for garnishes. Three of them get binned (a wheel gets cut, the rest softens by midnight, gets pulled, replaced for tomorrow). 1,000 lemons a year, of which ~700 get thrown away. Call it 5kg of usable lemon out of 7-8kg paid for, and another hidden cost in time and porter wages.
A 1kg pouch of dried wheels covers a year of garnishes for the same bar. It costs less than the fresh-lemon waste they were already eating. And the head bartender doesn't have to remember to write "lemons" on the list anymore.
That's a margin story, not a flavour story. Syrups don't fix it.
What this means for the brand
Garnish & Co. exists at the intersection of two ideas that are usually kept apart:
- Hospitality-grade prep, the kind chefs and bartenders care about.
- Pantry-grade convenience, the kind home cooks reach for.
Most brands pick one. We're doing both because the underlying product is honest enough that it can wear either uniform. A bartender opening a kilo pouch sees the same wheel as a home cook opening a 30g jar, same cut, same drying schedule, same fruit. We just put it in a different sized container with a different shaped label.
What's next
Lemon, lime, orange. Three flavours, three formats. We'll know we got it right when the first thousand jars are gone and the first ten bars are reordering on autopilot.
The right way to garnish.