Our Pine Nuts
We process our pine nuts in a world-class facility
Pinoli Ltd is a privately-owned New Zealand company, growing Mediterranean stone pine trees in plantations to establish a resource from which many benefits can be obtained. We harvest cones and process pine nuts in a world-class facility in Marlborough, NZ. We supply domestically to many food stores within NZ and export additional kernels to Australia and to Europe.
The Company was started by Andy and Barbara Wiltshire in 1997 and has developed in partnership with Lee Paterson and Zoe Thompson. The founders share a background and expertise in pine forestry, a very keen interest in fine foods and a lot of patience! Our first plantation was planted in 1998 and we have continued planting more pine nut forest since then. We have over 500 hectares planted, with new plantations developing and our supply is expected to increase rapidly over the next 10 years.
We have been producing pine nuts for the NZ domestic market since 2010. Exports to Europe began in 2013. Our processing factory was built between 2013 and 2015 to bring world-class machinery and techniques to the extraction and preparation of our kernels. We have full New Zealand food safety audits for our facilities and processes and we continue to make minor adjustments, with the constant goal of producing the world’s best pine nuts.
Pinus pinea
We selected the Mediterranean stone pine (Pinus pinea) for our plantations because it yields the most sought after pine nut in the culinary world. It is a beautiful tree, tough and resilient to dry and sunny climates, and adaptable to cultivation. Stone pine has a long and sustained history of usage throughout Europe over thousands of years.
Pinoli pine nuts are a healthy and nutritious natural whole food. They contain the highest protein count of all nuts (34% by weight). They have an elegant shape, a delicate texture and distinctive taste. The only chemicals used in producing Pinoli pine nuts are for grass control at time of planting our tree seedlings! After that our plantations are free of herbicides, insecticides and fungicides, and our factory uses only pure filtered water and heat during processing. Between process runs commercial cleaning fluids are used to keep the machinery in pristine condition. We take great pride in bringing this natural and ancient food product to market from new and sustainable plantations.
We have sold land near our factory to facilitate the construction of a solar array and this will further improve our carbon profile. We have plans to electrify plantation machinery, and vehicles as soon as possible with the goal of reducing greenhouse gas emissions to as near-zero. We sell our cone and nut shell by-product to local businesses as replacement for coal in their boilers. Our plantations sequester much more CO2 from the atmosphere than we emit from our operations and management, so on a net basis we have a negative carbon footprint (that is; net removal of CO2 from the atmosphere). The NZ Government has not allowed eligibility for Pinus pinea under the NZ Emissions Trading Scheme, which results in a very serious disadvantage for us relative to more conventional forest planting. We remain optimistic that this decision might be reconsidered in due course.
Our medium-term goal is to bring our business to a level where it is a truly sustainable circular economic unit covering all of its emissions, producing a net benefit for the atmosphere, generating its own heat and supplying surplus renewable energy to other consumers and businesses.