The Smoke Shed

Our Boutique New Product Champion 2025, The Smoke Shed, had the judges reaching for seconds for their Bunneys Worcester Sauce. 'Well-balanced flavours. Excellent product,' they noted. This home HQ sauce operation out of little Pukekawa is built on a recipe that travelled from Wales to New Zealand over a century ago—and on the stubborn determination of mum and dad operators who weren't about to let a few setbacks get in the way.

Many recipes outlive the hands that first scrawled them down. Recipes passed from kitchen to kitchen, across oceans and generations. Bunneys Worcester Sauce is one such recipe.

Stand above the green folds of North Waikato on a still morning, mist lifting off the paddocks, hills rolling into hills, and you could easily mistake it for the Welsh countryside: the same patchwork quilt of pasture, a familiar rhythm to rural living. Perhaps that's why Bunneys Worcester Sauce settled so naturally into New Zealand—the way a good sauce settles into food that's made for it. When Jayde Lane's great-great-grandfather, Edwin Bunney, carried the recipe from Pontypridd over a century ago, he found familiar terrain.

The valleys he left behind and those his descendants now call home share more than a passing resemblance. For over a century, the recipe existed quietly within the family—a bottle atop the dinner table, accompanying roasts and marinades and the kind of meals that pull people back for seconds. When Jayde, a rural Kiwi, met her future husband Andrew, a South African, they discovered a shared language around food. His braai and Edwin's sauce proved a potent combination. Backyard gatherings became arenas of research and development, and a business began to take shape.

"What if we could share this with many people?," Jayde and Andrew asked themselves at the time. "If it's helping bring our family and friends together around food, then it's bound to help others as well."

The Smoke Shed launched properly in early 2024, though 'launched' might be heavy-handed. The couple had been tinkering with their barbecue sauce, built on those ancestral Worcester foundations, when life intervened. In June, Jayde suffered a serious head injury at work—a fall that prompted a departure from full-time teaching and fast-tracked the side business.

"We took the time that I had in between all of my rehab stuff to lift this up," Jayde explains. "It's been really good way of moving from full-time work to a position where I'm still able to be busy, but at a pace that's more suitable for the lifestyle I have to adapt to."

Fast-tracked is accurate. Their first market stall was wrangled together with exactly one day's notice. The night before, Jayde and Andrew were up until 2am, hand-printing labels on a home printer that kept jamming, cutting them out on a craft machine never designed for commercial use. "It was an absolute pain in the backside," Jayde recalls—but that debut at the Pukekohe Farmers and Artisan Market was a sell-out. "I think that was the real big push that, okay, we're onto something."

It was September 2024, and with Christmas approaching, the couple threw themselves into the deep end—markets every weekend, sometimes four in a single stretch, hauling stock and marquee across the North Island while raising a two-year-old and a six-year-old at home.

"We didn't have savings to really draw on, so we had to work for it to keep it up," says Jayde. "We're just a good old Kiwi family trying to make something happen." She now manages background operations around her ongoing recovery; Andrew, still working full-time as a concrete placer, takes the front-of-house role on trading days.

At the 2025 Outstanding NZ Food Producer Awards, that determination was recognised. Bunneys Worcester Sauce took Gold and the Boutique New Product Champion title, while The Barbecue Sauce earned Silver, with judges praising its "innovative, well-layered flavours." Proudly handmade in small batches, the Worcester is the essence behind every sauce the pair create—and a pantry essential in its own right. Since launch, The Smoke Shed has expanded into artisan rubs, hot mustard sauce, tomato sauce, and other condiments, all handcrafted from their Pukekawa home.

Today, the couple offer a range of handmade, artisan condiments with a focus on creating  ‘sauces that earn their place’. Jadye explains, ‘Our sauces are designed to move across a week of meals, they’re made to work just as comfortably in marinades and mince as they are on roasts, braais, vegetables, and leftovers. It’s a response to the modern fridge door crowded with half-used bottles, and a quiet return to a more practical way of cooking for each other: fewer sauces, used more often, each one pulling its weight, the way it used to be when a little was enough.”

Armed with this kaupapa, the couple is also shifting focus from the relentless market circuit toward expos and stockists, taking The Smoke Shed to Wellington, Palmerston North, and beyond. It's a chance, Jayde admits, "to get a bit of our life back" while building something that can sustain their family long-term.

To find The Smoke Shed's award-winning sauces, visit the website.