Supreme Sausage Made In Canterbury

It’s official – New Zealand’s best sausage is made on the outskirts of Christchurch.

Hellers last night won the Supreme Award at the 2008 Great New Zealand Sausage Competition for its Kransky sausage - a complement to the award
it won earlier this year for New Zealand’s best bacon.

Director Todd Heller says he’s thrilled with this win and sees it as a vote of confidence in his staff.

“We make 3-million sausages a week so the Kransky is off a production line and competed against handmade sausages from boutique butcheries all
over the country,” he says.

“At Hellers, we take great pains to make our products consistent, so what a customer buys this week will be the same taste and quality the next week.
It’s a real coup for this sausage off a production line to win not only its own category, but also the Supreme Award.”

Mr Heller says the Kransky is based on sausages made by Italians living in America and has a special taste.

“It is made of smoked pork, coarsely ground and its secret is the high-melt cheese we fold in,” he says. “The cheese doesn’t disappear when the sausage
is cooked, so you get the nice texture of smoked pork with creamy cheese.”

This is not the first time Hellers has won the Supreme Award for one of its sausages. Its “London Pride” traditional English pork sausage won the title in 2002
and the company has won more than 40 awards over the past ten years.

“It’s lovely to have won both the country’s best sausage award and the country’s best bacon award this year,” he says.

BACKGROUND:

Todd Heller is a fourth generation butcher and opened his first butchery in New Brighton in 1985. He used recipes gleaned and tastes sampled through
overseas travel to offer his customers kebabs, marinated meats and flavoured sausages.

Word spread and Todd soon added a factory at the back of his shop until in 1990 the specialty sausages were being supplied to supermarkets.

Three years later, his company moved to its meat processing plant at Kaiapoi. These days, the company has more than 400 staff producing up to 300 tonne
of sausages a week – which adds up to about 175 million sausages a year - including 80 different types of sausages and saveloys, as well as bacon, ham
and deli smallgoods.

ENDS

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