I find Sarah Balle in the make-up room preparing for the cover shoot looking fresh-faced and incredibly young. Indeed, she is only 34, and her DNA harks back to Ireland, hence the pale skin and dark eyebrows. She’s one of a family of six children whose parents were (and still are) market gardeners working the land out in Pukekohe where she grew up and has recently returned to live. She looks every bit the child of Irish immigrant parents, brought up, she says, “in a hardworking, humble environment where everyone pitched in and privileges were earned.”
I ask her if this is the first time she has been forced to sit still in front of a mirror and she laughs and agrees that it’s kind of nice to succumb to being pampered. I interview her while the make-up artist hovers over her because I’m pretty sure that being interviewed at the same time as doing a photo shoot would make perfect economic sense to her.
Her phone is out and her hands flutter across the screen, replying to texts and sending emails. I don’t need a reminder that I have captured a very busy person. I am already fully aware that founding an online supermarket and raising $2.5 million in seed money to compete with a duopoly dominated by the “big boys” (Foodstuffs and Countdown) kind of undersells the word “busy”.
Supie, an online supermarket, is Sarah’s dream child. An idea born out of a “collision of ideas” that arose in her mind while trying to solve a problem.
“I wanted to find a way to redirect some of that food destined for waste to the people who need it most,” she says. “I wanted to find a better way in which food producers can
