Article: The story behind Vutter and who we are!
- Aline Fonseca
- Feb 4
- 5 min read
Kia ora! For those who don’t know us, we’re a husband and wife team running Feliz Wholefoods.
Here is the real story behind Vutter and who we are!
Patrick, my husband, still works full-time in his architecture business. Alongside that, he runs our production, systems, logistics, and all the endless processes that keep a food business standing. And me - Aline - I work full-time in Feliz. I do everything else from product development, to sales, marketing, admin, accounts, purchasing, content creating, storytelling, and make about a thousand small decisions a day. And this is how it all began...
I developed Vutter at home around mid 2018, simply because I couldn’t find what I was looking for. I’m a former chef. Back in Brazil, I owned a fine-dining bistro with my name - Chez Aline Bistro' - I specialized in French cuisine, which basically means butter, butter, and more butter! Butter is flavour. It’s texture. It’s comfort! So when I stopped eating dairy, margarine was never going to be an option. Ever.
What I wanted was something clean, that was plant-based, and genuinely delicious. Something that behaved like butter and tasted like butter. But everything I tried fell short. So I did what most chefs would do: I started making my own!
At first, it was just for our family. Then friends tried it. Then friends of friends. And every single person who tried, could not believe it wasn't butter - disclaimer, not one of those people were vegans! So Patrick and I looked at each other and thought: "This is way too delicious... The world deserves to have this too" .
But, timing matters... At that point, we were both working full-time and raising four young kids. Starting a food manufacturing business felt wildly unrealistic. So the idea sat quietly in the background, waiting...
Then, we had pause we didn’t ask for, but really needed: 2020 arrived, and the world stopped!
Like many people, the pandemic gave us something we hadn’t had in years: time. Time to reflect. Time to ask uncomfortable questions. At the time, I was working full-time for a wine company. And while I enjoy a glass of wine, something didn’t sit right. I had spent the last years before that selling organic food into supermarkets - products that I genuinely believed in - and now, I was selling alcohol...
At the same time, a close family member was struggling with alcoholism. Watching that up close forces you to think deeply about purpose, impact, and what you’re contributing to the world. That quiet existential crisis, mixed with the product we already knew was special, gave me the push I needed. I had to "be the change"!
We launched Vutter on 7 September 2020. Within two weeks, it was on ten shelves across Auckland. A week later, all ten stores reordered.
At that point, I was working during the day, and making Vutter at night in a tiny food truck parked right outside our bedroom window. While the house slept, I was out there stirring, packing, cleaning, dreaming...
A month after launching, I made the hardest decision ever - I quit my full time salary based job to start Vutter. It was just the most insane time to be quitting a steady full time job to start a food start up - in the chilled sector! With very little capital!!
But, the demand for Vutter was coming from all over New Zealand, and if we were going to do this, it needed my full energy. We really believed in this -we still do!! - so together as a family, we made the call. We follow our intuitions and went against all odds!
By May 2021, we sent our first orders to New World stores in the North Island. By July, we were supplying the South Island too. Things were moving fast.
We’ve been growing entirely organically. No huge investors, no marketing budgets, no glossy ad campaigns. Just product, persistence, weekend tastings, and a lot of loooooong days.
Our home slowly became unrecognizable at that point: four young teenagers, three office desks in our lounge, fridges and freezers all over our carport, huge refrigerator trucks outside our Devonport home daily to pick up orders to distribute, and production happening most nights in that little food truck. Eventually, something had to give.
We took a huge leap of and signed a big ($$) 2 year lease in Takapuna. We doubled our production space, sold the food truck, and invested in a walk-in chiller. It felt like a milestone. Boom. "We’re a real business now"!
But a year and a half later, we had to face a hard truth: the overheads were threatening to sink the very business we’d built with so much care. We hit everything at once: more lockdowns, crazy inflation, ingredient shortages, floods at our new place, raw materials doubling in price overnight, refrigerated transport costs soaring, and supermarkets squeezing margins harder and harder. When you’re small, every supermarket review cycle feels existential. The threat of deletion is real and constant. One email can undo years of work. And yet, demand for Vutter kept on growing....
So, we went into crisis management mode! Two incredible people somehow landed into our lives at the perfect time, and they stepped in as advisors - not to rescue us, but to help us see things clearly again and make better decisions. We did not want to borrow any money and get ourselves into debt - smarter decision ever!! - so we had to somehow shrink our overheads asap - or we would not survive. So we did! And we moved again (read more about this here)
Slowly, we recalibrated. And we got out of the red!!! That period changed us. It made us sharper. More intentional. More resilient. More focused than ever. We always worked incredibly hard. Often quietly. Often behind the scenes. But always with intention. That's why we keep going.
Feliz Wholefoods was never about being the biggest. It’s always been about being honest.
And yes, we have great belief and big ambitions for Vutter (and for future products we’re working on). We’re bigger now - we have better processes, smarter systems and know a lot more than we did then. But we are still small, and still very hands-on, still learning - the hard way more often than we’d like. But we’re here, and we are here to stay!
We’re deeply grateful to every person who’s picked up a pack of Vutter, cooked with it, backed us, and believed in us. This is the story behind Vutter. Not polished. Not perfect. But real.
And if you ever see us out in the 'outside world' -at a market, a store, a food show, a random event - feel free to come say hi. We genuinely love a good chat! We love listening, learning, exchanging ideas, 'solving big world problems', and we are always keen to understand what people actually want from their food. Those conversations shape everything we do. And we do it with a lot of love.
Thanks for reading, and for being in this journey with us.
With great respect, and much gratitude and aroha,
Aline
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