Why we dried the citrus.

Garnish & Co. started because a bartender we know used to bin three lemons for every cocktail he made. He'd cut a wheel, garnish a Negroni, and watch the rest soften on the pass.

So we bought the lemons before the bin did. We cut them at 3mm, dried them slowly so the oils stayed in the skin, and sealed them for the long shelf. Same wheel. None of the waste. Plus a year in the cupboard.

Hand-made, not mass-made.

Every jar is hand-cut and hand-packed in our home kitchen. We buy citrus from named growers around New Zealand, not boxes from a distributor's distributor, and dry them in small batches so we can taste-check every run. If the oranges are flat one week, we wait until they're not.

It's the opposite of how industrial dried fruit gets made. They speed it up; we slow it down. They blast it with heat to push throughput; we hold it low so the rind doesn't go bitter. They pack it in plastic to hit a price; we use glass so you can see what you bought.

Built for the trade. Loved at home.

The 1kg pouches were the first thing we made, for bars and cafes who were doing the porter-runs-to-Countdown thing and quietly bleeding margin on the bin. Then friends asked for the jars. Then strangers asked. The jar exists because civilians wanted in.

We still think of the format as a hospo tool that civilians are allowed to use. The way home bakers cook with the same flour their bakery does, or home baristas grind on the same espresso burr a café would. There's no kids' version. The product is the product.

What's next.

Lemon, lime, orange. Three flavours, three formats, real citrus from this country. We'll know we got it right when the first thousand jars are gone.

The right way to garnish.

Vicky Poonia, founder