Forty Thieves
From one box a day to 20,000 jars a week. That's the incredible journey of Forty Thieves, the FMCG Business New Product Champion 2025. Learn how an adventurous husband-and-wife team harnessed the power of natural ingredients to fuel adventures and build a successful - and award-winning - international Kiwi nut butter brand.
Since being founded by Shyr and Brent Godfrey in 2016, Forty Thieves has become a prominent name in New Zealand’s thriving nut butter industry. Testament to that is being awarded Outstanding Food Producer Awards FMCG Business New Product Champion 2025 for Forty Thieves Peanut Butter Crunchy.
While Shyr and Brent’s journey began humbly producing just one box of nut butter a day, today they produce around 20,000 jars every week in their Hibiscus Coast factory. As well sharing their nut butters with Kiwi consumers, the family-owned business also exports to Singapore, Malaysia, Taiwan and recently added Hong Kong. Despite scale, quality remains at the heart of production.
After spending time on the essential Kiwi OE, Brent and Shyr discovered that they worked well as a team, combining their skills to create something special. Their love of fitness, adventure and healthy eating led them to create delicious nut butters, driven by their need for high-protein food that fitted their lifestyle and their desire to harness the power of natural ingredients.
In 2025 their range has extended from their initial pure nut butters to offer flavoured nut butters and a delicious range of curry pastes, packing every jar with protein, healthy fats, minerals and vitamins.
Forty Thieves prides itself on its simple production process: roasting, milling, mixing, labelling, and bottling. They don’t use emulsifiers or preservatives, allowing the natural oil or cocoa butter to rise to the top. This approach requires quality ingredients and shows consumers the benefits of choosing real natural nut butters, where you can simply stir the goodness back in.
Nut selection is vital to deliver the Forty Thieves range. Each variety of nut is inspected and roasted to perfection, ensuring balance between rich and sweet in the finished product. Forty Thieves nut butters offer health benefits alongside incredible taste, for example, their chocolate nut butters feature 80-85% whole nuts, avoiding the use of sugar and oil as fillers. Forty Thieves source Bee-Friendly Certified Almonds from Vann Family Orchards. Almonds grown in environments where bees are provided with clean water, permanent habitats and annual flowering plants, ensuring the health and sustainability of bee populations.
According to Shyr; “Success in FMCG is very much a volume game. With low margins, rising costs, strong competition and high ROS expectations from our retail partners, we never anticipated how many peanut and nut butters we would need to sell every single day, to ensure our business is profitable and thriving!”
“We've had to work incredibly hard to grow our distribution, which is 500 stores across all supermarket banners. We’re constantly battling for better shelf placement to ensure our products are top of mind. Developing export markets has been a great volume driver too.”
“We’ve invested in state-of-the-art machinery and produce all our top-quality nut butters in house for efficiency and quality. We've always put our customers first, prioritising their needs and maintaining a consistent product.”
Its mission statement drives forty Thieves; ‘Fuelling everyday and epic adventures’. Shyr explain this saying, we’re incredibly passionate about the idea that food is fuel and believe spending time in nature and giving hard things a go is what keeps life meaningful.
Being active individuals, Brent and Shyr enjoy heading down to Hibiscus Coast beaches with their three young daughters. Ocean swims, barbeques with friends and family, and enjoying live music when possible, all ‘adventures’ in their busy schedule.
Get the full Forty Thieves story and see their extensive product range here.