Kairapu Toa

Golden began in the galley of a small yacht bound for Kawau Island. A spoon of mānuka honey. A pot of stovetop berry syrup. A SodaStream bottle on its last burp of CO₂.

As the wind dropped, I came back to a question that had been chewing me all summer: could a soda be light, clean and full-flavoured using only New Zealand honey and fruit?

It felt obvious once I said it out loud. New Zealand is world-renowned for mānuka honey and we grow world-class fruit, but no local drinks brand had meaningfully brought those two strengths together. No one had put honey at the centre and built flavours that clearly express where they come from, and who grows them.

I wasn’t sure it would work. I wondered if the honey would swamp the fruit, or if the acidity would cut too sharply.

It did neither.

The first batch was bright and refreshing, with honey notes you simply don’t get from refined sugar or chemical sweeteners. I was hooked. And the mission snapped into focus: build a New Zealand drinks brand rooted in local honey and fruit, anchored in the supply chains I already knew.

I spent my teenage summers working long days on the coastal orchards around Bay View, Napier. Strawberries before sunrise. Apples and peaches through the heat of the day. Potatoes pulled from the soil for the orchard store in the evening.

I packed fruit, thinned trees, and learnt how produce moves from tree to shelf, through pack-houses, cold stores, and export dispatch. Work like that gives you a bias for hard-working ingredients and straight processes. No shortcuts. No mystery chemicals.

Later, I collected a few pieces of paper (and a sobering amount of debt) across Mt Aspiring College, Victoria University, Auckland University and AUT, then cut my teeth on advertising sets as an assistant director. I poured my energy into selling other people’s products and the longer I did, the stronger the itch to build something of my own. The more I worked ads for New Zealand’s boring oligopolies, the more I found myself “imagineering” the products I’d rather champion, and the stories I’d rather tell.

One idea kept resurfacing, motivated strongly by nostalgia for my time working the harvest: pair New Zealand honey with fruit, made here, from ingredients with real provenance.

San Pellegrino announces Italy. Our fruit-growing regions and mānuka forests deserve an equivalent. Golden is my answer.

That quick galley batch set everything in motion. Over the next three years I kept testing: bench trials, pilot runs, and round after round of refinement with support from Callaghan Innovation and food scientists at Massey University. Real ingredients are harder to get spot-on than hyper-processed alternatives, but the results are worth it.

In 2024, I backed myself, stepping away from a tech company I was working for at the time, and launched Golden.

We sweeten with mānuka and kānuka honey, flavour with real New Zealand fruit, and use no refined sugar. Familiar flavours, reimagined with hard-working ingredients. Things we grow here. Light, balanced and full-flavour sodas.

Made in New Zealand.