With a degree in sports and exercise nutrition from the University of Otago, Marewa Sutherland was racing for a local road-bike team and had rowed for the national under-21 academy.
This balanced nicely with brother Simon Kraak’s flair for business and he was road racing recreationally.
Wanting to gain enough fuel to maintain this training and racing load they started looking for a more natural sports drink only to realise there was a gap in the market.
So they did something about it and Pure Sports Nutrition was co-founded in 2012.
Mr Kraak said they were using a lot of sport drinks and had struggled to find a natural product.
"Back then most of them were sweet and sickly. When we looked up all the ingredients none of them were healthy and it was quite clear there was no emphasis on making a high-quality product and they weren’t overly healthy with the flavourings. Just weird flavours, really sweet, cheap standard electrolytes, so that gave us the question: why are they making them so cheap?"
After researching every ingredient going into a sports drink they selected the best of them.
Then the duo began working out their own blend.
Their first carb mix was gentle on the stomach, but still fast absorbing, and they managed to remove much of the sickly sweetness, while the electrolytes were more bio-available than standard electrolytes. More costly freeze-dried fruit produced locally was added to flavour the drinks.
"Then we started riding with them on the bikes and they were a bit sweet so we dialled some of the sweetness out of them. We worked out when you exercise you are more sensitive to flavour and we actually had to dull off the sports drink to make them really palatable to use and easy to drink."
Many years later Electrolyte Hydration remains their No 1 sports drink in a much-increased range.
Initially, Pure was aimed at endurance athletes and they started knocking on doors, convincing local cycling store owners to stock them. Today, the drink is available in many outlets, including supermarkets.
The company has carried on sponsoring sports events to get its brands out since handing products to athletes early on. Now it sponsors 100 Australasian cycling, endurance, running, marathon and other events, including Ironman NZ and Ironman Australia.
As it has grown, its customer base has widened to active people — including hikers and hunters — attracted by natural ingredients and wanting to lead healthier lifestyles.
"It was essentially us and some big players in the industry, mostly overseas. Some of these guys do like $US100million ($NZ173m) turnover. We learned early on you had to have a good product if you want to compete with these multinational huge companies."
The price point between them was "fairly comparable".
They worked out they could get a good margin to grow the business by making products in-house without compromising on ingredients, buying the right machinery to be efficient and doing all the work themselves.
About five years after starting they invested in a machine to make energy gels in sachets for endurance competitors. At that stage the product was the only one of its kind in the country.
The gels have about the same amount of energy as a banana and help athletes perform for hours without consuming bulky food.
Early on, they would go into their father’s sandwich-making factory at night and blend up powder, pack it by hand and put stickers on the back.
The first batch of 60 bags has grown to a pouch packer rolling out 1000 bags an hour.
"We make upwards of 30,000 gels a day now on our latest machine. That was essentially done by trial and error and the same format of using the best ingredients. Over the years we have figured out that we’ve had to invest in the business constantly and buy the right machinery."
Today, Pure’s range of 70 products across two brands is exported to Australia after building up a sales presence "step by step" over five years to become its largest endurance brand.
Australia provides nearly 50% of the company’s turnover, while Pure products also go to Singapore and Indonesia, with further export markets in the offing.
The business model took 10 years to work out and was not an overnight success, as continual progress took hard work, a lot of capital and pivoting, and time to figure it out along the way.
"There’s no rule book on how to do this, in my opinion. We have always had pretty good growth rates of 30% to 40% and 20% in a low year. Last year we grew it 60% and it was 50% the year before, so our growth rates have been pretty phenomenal the past few years," Mr Kraak said.
The business has just been recognised in the Deloitte Fast 50 awards, which celebrate New Zealand’s fastest-growing companies, ranking 37th nationally.
Pure Sports Nutrition was a regional winner in three of the nine fastest-growing categories: export business, food and beverage business and Māori or Pasifika-owned business for Christchurch and the upper South Island.
About the midway point, a capital raise helped pay off some debt, push out the product range and hire a new sales manager. The siblings continue to own about 62% of the business.
Before Pure Mr Kraak, 43, had a golf ball-selling venture at a young age and went on to sell plumbing fittings and car parts online and formed a charity collection company.
He became the managing director three years ago.
Since the capital raise they have decided to self-fund the business.
"We have been able to do that quite nicely and just continue to reinvest. We are currently building what I believe is the only effervescent tablet line in New Zealand ... like a low-carb sports drink in a little tablet and we think we can do some cool things in those."
By next year this will go into production at about 6000 tubes an hour.
Again, they will be sticklers on quality ingredients for this line, with powders coming from Germany, electrolytes from Germany and the US, flavouring from Australia and stevia from Japan.
The ingredients probably cost twice as much as making a cheap version, but that would be offset by greater efficient elsewhere.
Wanting to stay in Christchurch for the lifestyle, their team of 40 staff and access to ingredients, they started their own packing factory and warehouse in Hillsborough when a packing company was closed down, rather than moving to Auckland.
Mr Kraak said they would continue with the same philosophy of reinvesting to grow the business and keeping debt low to constantly improve.
