Everyone likes rooting for the underdog and for North Shore’s Bootleg Jerky it's been a recipe for success after it won big at this month’s Auckland business awards. 

The jerky maker has grabbed shelf space in New World supermarkets in just four years of operation and was one of the winners at the Westpac Auckland Business Awards last week, where it won the People’s Choice and was a finalist for the Emerging Business category. 

Bootleg Jerky was runner-up in last year’s People’s Choice category.

Founder Ash Razmi says it’s been “pretty humbling” to be in the awards two years in a row.

“We were up against massive companies that are probably doing 10 times the revenue that we're doing but people seem to just be backing us for some reason,” he says.

“We’ve had overwhelming support from complete strangers and it’s just been crazy.”

Humble beginnings

Razmi says he’s been “blown away” by the amount of support Bootleg has received over the past four years.

“There's always something new to learn and work your way through."

“We're really trying to go a bit outside the square and get Bootleg into as many different retail avenues as we can, so people see that jerky is something that isn’t just found in petrol stations.”

New World started stocking the Bootleg brand this year in its owner-operated stores around the country and Razmi hopes to get it out there to other supermarkets in the future.

That’s a far cry from Bootleg’s humble beginnings, which – reflecting its name – started in Razmi’s garage.

“It was cool at the start,” he says. “But the novelty wore off real quick when the house started to smell like roast beef all the time and we had to have a skip at the front of the house.”

Razmi reflects fondly on the journey to get his “premium jerky” business off the ground – which began in 2018 after a visit to the United States, where he saw how varied and popular that market was, and how limited it was back home. 

“When I came back to New Zealand and looked around for premium-made jerky, no one was making it,” he says.

“I thought there must be a business opportunity here.”

'The first batch'

He and his younger brother, Murdoch Razmi, took the plunge, playing around with flavours and teaching themselves how to make jerky.

“We made the first batch in our oven at home with the door cracked open."

After ironing out recipes and cooking processes, Razmi says they moved from the oven to a small home dehydrator and started selling the jerky at weekend markets.

“But I got sick of standing at the market all day and only selling $300 worth, as I knew my time was way better spent doing something else,” he says.

“Because I come from a business development and marketing background, I decided to just start going door-knocking and managed to get Bootleg into a couple of local bottle stores.”

Within a week, five North Shore bottle stores were stocking Bootleg Jerky.

“I thought it was a way easier way to get Bootleg out there to people than staying at the market, so I just kept doing that,” he says.

With his full-time job taking him to various parts of the country, Razmi started to bring packets of Bootleg Jerky and pitch samples to any stores he happened upon.

“Before we knew it, we suddenly had Bootleg in 60 stores around the country."

“Me and my missus were packing orders in the middle of the night to stay on top of the demand.”

It got to the point where Razmi and his wife Bryony couldn’t give Bootleg the “energy it needed” on top of their full-time jobs and young family.

“I talked to my boss and said, look, man, I think I'm going to quit my job and set up a jerky factory in my garage. My boss asked if I was sure about the business – I was on really good money at my old job and it was a great role.

“But I knew I had to go full-time with Bootleg, or I was going to regret it,” he says.

This was in September of 2020.

'Many challenges'

Razmi says the garage was meant to be short term while he and his brother raised enough money to find a small factory, but the pandemic dragged that out.

Funding came from an unexpected place: Razmi’s former boss came on board as Bootleg’s new co-director.

Razmi says Bootleg has been lucky to escape the pandemic mostly unscathed, but it created “many challenges” – especially when it came to finishing the factory.

“We brought in two containers of custom-built equipment but then we went into lockdown in August,” he says.

“The people that were in our premises before us couldn’t move out and so we couldn’t do anything with the new factory for a bit.”

He says they kept the “garage factory” running before they finally managed to move into the “actual factory” just before Christmas.

“By the time we got the keys to our factory premises, our whole house was covered in jerky packets."

Jerky hasn’t ever been a staple in NZ the way it is in America, but Razmi hopes to change that.

“We only use the best cuts of 100% grass-fed New Zealand beef and use all-natural ingredients,” he says. “There's no preservatives, nothing artificial, no MSG.”

Demand has grown so much that they now use a walk-in dryer that dries 500 kilograms of meat at a time.

“We can do around 13,000 to 14,000 packs a week at the moment, which should keep us pretty busy,” he says.

And if that’s not enough to bring a smile, Razmi’s “very happy” that his house no longer smells of roast beef.