Fence Lines

It has been announced that the New Zealand Government is courting Aldi and other international supermarket conglomerates in an effort to bust up this country’s duopoly and lower food prices.

I was interested to read recently about the comparison of Chelsea branded sugar with Pams — the supermarket’s home brand.

Supermodels came to the fore in the 1980s, driving the commercial dollar towards an idealised standard of beauty.

In my new business, we buy New Zealand-grown berries — boysenberries and blackcurrants — for their anti-inflammatory and anti-microbial properties.

Ukraine, Covid-19, climate change, rising living costs — it’s quite overwhelming and sometimes I stop facing the avalanche and mentally retire.

I have been saddened by the lack of empathy for people in business during the Covid-19 pandemic.

Perhaps the middle of a global pandemic was the wrong time to pick up the book Empire of Pain: The Secret History of the Sackler Dynasty, by Patrick Radden Keefe.

When I look at the people I trained with on my way to becoming a scientist, very few remain in a traditional science career, yet when we were training, that was all that was presented to us.

When we meet people, we immediately judge and categorise them, based on how they look and how that fits with people we have met before who look that way.

I have been following Sir Ian Taylor’s MIQ diary as he travels to the US, demonstrating, with smarts and technology, how we can develop a system which allows us to travel more freely while still...

When I was a student, I would walk from the Botany Department to my flat on George St. Every day, I passed Scribes Second Hand Books.

The  “No8 wire” mentality was born from making something out of nothing. Farmers would need a gate, or equivalent, and rather than wait months for the gate to be shipped, wire was jury-rigged...

In 1881, the first frozen shipment of red meat left New Zealand for the United Kingdom.

I love reading business books and some years ago a book was published, Your Strategy Needs a Strategy, by Martin Reeves, Knut Haanaes and Janmejaya Sinha.

This lockdown is a drag, there is no dressing it up I’m afraid. But ‘‘it is what it is’’ and we do what we can to make the best of it.

I half watched the All Blacks on Saturday night. I was a bit like the half-filled stadium, interested but not particularly engaged. Earlier that day I had my fill of community sports, watching...

My first Otago Daily Times column was in January 2014 — time flies.

I heard about a young Australian entrepreneur, Ben Pasternak, who moved to New York at the age of 16 to start a business — he’s now 21.