Meet Tamco — For The Love Of Tams
Meet Tamco — For The Love Of Tams
Some brands start in a boardroom. Tamco started with a panini.
Robin and Heather Nitschke were having lunch at a café in Silverdale, north of Auckland, when they tried a relish they couldn't stop thinking about — built from a fruit most Australians have never heard of and most Kiwis hadn't touched since their nan's garden. The tamarillo. Tangy, jammy, somewhere between a tomato and a passionfruit, and almost nobody was doing anything serious with it.
They spent five years finding out if that first taste was a fluke — setting up most Saturdays at the Northland farmers markets, testing recipes on anyone who'd try them. It wasn't a fluke. So they teamed up with a handful of local Northland orchardists and formed the NZ Tamarillo Co-operative, giving themselves a proper supply of the fruit. Then they spent eighteen months building their own extraction equipment from scratch, because nobody made gear designed to get the sweetest pulp out of a tamarillo — so they built it themselves.
Tamco launched in May 2014 from Whangarei, Northland. Since then the range has stayed tight and deliberate: relish, vinaigrette, a fruit preserve — all small-batch, glass-packed, no artificial colours, no shortcuts. It's picked up NZ National Food Awards recognition and NZ Artisan Food Awards gold along the way, but the short version is simpler: a Northland couple fell for a fruit nobody was championing, and built a genuinely small business around doing right by it.
Alright, what actually is a tamarillo?
Fair question — most of Australia's never met one. The tamarillo is an egg-shaped fruit, usually deep red to purple-red skin, originally from the Andes in South America, where it's called tomate de árbol — "tree tomato." It's in the same family as tomatoes, chillies and eggplant, which is exactly why it eats savoury as easily as it eats sweet.
It landed in New Zealand in the late 1800s and was called "tree tomato" for the best part of a century, until 1967 when NZ's Tree Tomato Promotions Council rebranded it "tamarillo" to give it its own identity for export. The flesh is soft and tangy — tart, slightly sweet, a bit like a cross between a tomato and a passionfruit — while the skin and white pith are bitter and get stripped out before use.
Why it's genuinely rare
This isn't a marketing line. Commercial tamarillo growing in NZ is concentrated in Northland, and the industry has shrunk hard — from something like 450 commercial growers in the mid-2000s down to around two dozen today, per Horticulture New Zealand's own figures. Every jar of Tamco relish and every bottle of vinaigrette is built on a fruit that's genuinely getting harder to find, made by one of only a small handful of producers anywhere in the world working with it commercially.
How to use it
The relish is built to sit alongside food, not take it over — spoon it onto a cheeseboard or next to cold cuts, fold it through a meatloaf or casserole mix, spread it thin under pizza toppings, or use it exactly where you'd reach for tomato relish on a steak or snags off the barbie. The vinaigrette is a proper dressing first — over salads, whisked into a marinade before meat hits the grill, or drizzled over grilled haloumi and roast vegetables — with enough character to work as a finishing touch on its own, no oil required.
Recognition
Tamco has picked up NZ National Food Awards finalist recognition and NZ Artisan Food Awards gold medals along the way — real results for a small Northland producer working with one deliberately narrow, deliberately rare ingredient.
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