Year one, together
Twenty-five years ago, a 20-year-old grower and a woman with a van each started a business. Southern Fresh and Alignz have been growing side by side ever since.
In 2000, Jeremy Dunn’s parents sold the flower nursery they had run for 20 years, and handed their son something else entirely.
“I was fresh – I was just 20,” he says. “It was pretty much thrown at me. Right, we’re starting this business, it’s yours. Go for it. So I was very much in the deep end.”
The new business was Southern Fresh: 30 acres at Tamahere, a handful of staff, and an idea about baby vegetables. What it didn’t have was people. Growing outdoors is a trade where the crop determines the timetable, and 30 acres of hand-picked produce needs more hands than a family can supply.
At almost exactly the same moment, Meta Tyrell was working on the same problem from the opposite end.
She had left real estate because the hours were unsustainable and instead had gone picking – strawberries first, then whatever the season offered. She knew what the work asked of a body because she had done it herself. And she could see something the
growers couldn’t see from the packhouse: there were people in her community who wanted this work, and no reliable way for them to get to it.
So she started organising. A crew of six became a crew of 37, most of them from Pacific families around the Waikato. And she got a van to transport those workers to and from jobs.
One day Meta pulled into a driveway in Tamahere.
“She just called in and saw us and evolved from there,” Jeremy says. “She dropped in to see if we wanted any staff – kind of a cold call.”
What Southern Fresh needed wasn’t complicated. Reliable workers. What arrived was a woman who understood the job from the inside.
“Pretty much all our staff came through Meta at that time,” Jeremy says. “We were both in year one at the same time. We were definitely learning and I think she probably was as well.”
What she brought
Ask Jeremy what made him stay with Meta – and Alignz Recruitment – and the answer is simple.
“It was her flexibility and her resource,” he says. “She was able to just pull in staff, which is what we needed, and she would monitor them and oversee them, hold them together. That ability to be flexible and adapt as we were growing. She would just work with us.”
Meta would drive the van around in the dark to collect people before dawn to take them to work, and she would drop them home at the end of the day. The conversations in between were about CVs, about turning up and being reliable, and about what a working life could look like if you built one. She was running a labour business and, at the same time, quietly running something closer to a family.
The problem that built a recruitment company
The turn came from inside her own crew.
One of Meta’s older pickers couldn’t manage the physical demands of a full season. Rather than let him go, Meta went looking for full-time work for him – and then, having started, for everybody. She knocked on doors, built relationships with businesses, and placed 34 of her 37 workers into permanent jobs.
It was the right instinct, and an education. Those first years taught her as much about pricing and profitability as they did about people.
“There were huge lessons learnt along the way,” Meta says of that period. “But ultimately, we wanted to carry on finding pathways into work for people.”
Meta’s husband Lesa brought finance and accounting discipline to the operation. Alignz Recruitment was born.
Thirty acres to 350
The Southern Fresh of 2026 would be almost unrecognisable to 20-year-old Jeremy in the deep end. 350 acres. Around 120 staff. A 20,000sqm automated glasshouse – New Zealand’s first automated hydroponic system, where a crop that takes 15 weeks in a paddock comes off in three or four, and one hectare under cover does the work of 40 outside.
Of course, it didn’t happen in a straight line.
The first customers were in London.
“We were exporting to the UK, twice-weekly shipments, supplying the top end of the hospitality trade,” Jeremy says. “Product was landing in the likes of Harrods.”
Then the exchange rate turned, but it had bought them a foothold, and they turned home.
The moment the business really took off was with salads.
“We felt the growth was stagnating. We thought we’ve actually got to do a bit more of a bold move.”
So Jeremy went to Australia, visited other growers’ operations, and saw baby leaf and mesclun becoming fashionable. Back home, they launched their baby leaf and mesclun offering and it’s been a huge success.
For Jeremy, the whole philosophy Southern Fresh runs on is “Quality and reliability. Probably almost the other way round. Reliability, and then quality.”
It is the same order in which he judges a labour partner.
Out of the paddock
Alignz was making its own version of that move at the same time.
Horticulture is seasonal by nature and Meta had spent years watching good people run out of work in April. By the mid-2000s Alignz had pushed into trades, industrial and commercial recruitment – the sectors that could offer the year-round employment she had gone looking for on behalf of one tired picker. An Auckland office followed in 2007. Then Bay of Plenty. Then Christchurch, Dunedin, and Melbourne.
Handing it on
Both are family businesses, and both have now done the hardest thing a family business does.
Southern Fresh did it in 2000, when Jeremy’s parents handed their son the keys.
Alignz did it six years ago, when Meta’s son TJay Asiata came home to New Zealand, completed an MBA, took the chief executive’s chair and restructured the business his mother had built. What emerged was LM4 Group: Alignz Recruitment alongside Puatala, which delivers industry skills training, and Oyonnx, which builds capability in small and medium businesses. Between them they now look after more than 450 contractors and around 50 permanent staff, and the group remains 100 per cent Samoan family-owned and operated.
In 2023 Meta received the Legacy Award from the Waikato Pacific Business Network. Her son’s description of her is short: “My mum’s my hero. Her legacy will drive us forward.”
What the relationship looks like now
The model has changed, and Jeremy is straightforward about that. Most Southern Fresh staff are now employed directly, because the work is 52 weeks a year rather than seasonal. Labour providers cover roughly 10 to 15 per cent of the workforce, rising through the Christmas-to-March peak when the growing season and the national appetite for salad arrive at once.
“There is still a strong place for labour providers,” he says.
Jeremy sees the labour market itself having eased. “Three years ago it was really challenging, hard to get, for everybody. But now, because we can largely provide full-time work, we don’t have such a problem. Seasonal workers are looking for full-time work, and we can provide that.” Here he pauses. “We like to think we’re an employer of choice.”
And for one particular employee, that must be true. Because he’s been there 23 years.
In a photograph from those early years, there is a young man named Mau. He came through Meta.
These days he’s on the salad harvest team.
“He got married while he was working for us, and had a child,” Jeremy says. “I was having a chat with him the other day. His daughter has just turned 21 or 22!”
A business that started with 30 acres now sends lettuce to Queenstown by air every night of the week. A woman who started with a van built a company that has put more than 15,000 people into work. And somewhere in the middle of all that growth, one man has spent his entire adult working life on the same team, watching a daughter grow up on the strength of it.
“We’re a family business, so we tend to treat it that way,” Jeremy says. “A really key part of what we talk about with our team is ownership mindset. In horticulture in particular, the product they’re handling every day is someone else’s food tomorrow. We want people to treat it that way.”
As Southern Fresh and Alignz continue to grow, it’s worth ending on Southern Fresh’s motto: grow together. Meta agrees: “We can do so much when we work together.”
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