How Habitual Fix created fresh food success

Lunchtime, central Auckland. Three police cars pull up in quick succession and are parked haphazardly alongside the pavement on Beaumont St. The officers dash into the Habitual Fix store and emerge minutes later, confident they’ve got what they were after.
It’s not just the cops who are satisfied with what they’ve found: the Sicilian Fix sandwiches, Tokyo Hit wraps and Bansai Bowl salads. They’ve joined the hungry white-collar workers who are regulars at Habitual Fix’s healthy gourmet takeaway; the customers that James Tucker and Tim Benest like to refer to as fresh food addicts.
It’s been the conviction of these two foodie entrepreneurs since they began their sandwich and salad bar franchise two years ago that customers would return daily for their fix of garden-fresh greens and prime sliced meats.
At the thriving Downtown store, owned and run by 21-year-old Tristan Zlami, 80% of the clientele come in most lunchtimes, Monday to Friday.
“It’s what we’ve got over our competitors,” Zlami says. “Our customers don’t get bored with what we do. We’ve got such a range of good fresh food, it gives them no reason to go elsewhere.”
And the addicts appear to be arriving in droves. Despite launching the business on the eve of
recession, Habitual Fix now has five stores in
Auckland, with month-to-month sales growing between 25% and 50%. Last month, five more Auckland stores were conditionally signed up — a boost to the Habitual Fix target of 13 stores by Christmas. There are more than 6000 loyalty cards used by the faithful, and Tucker, who has ‘King Pin’ on his business card, predicts the Fix group will turn over around $7 million this year.
No wonder Tucker and Benest, the cuisine connoisseur of the pair, are dining out on their success story so far.
A big slice of their motivation for a healthy-option takeaway store came from pizza. Both men were working for fast-food chains when they met, but each was looking for something more nourishing for their careers and consumers’ stomachs. Their motto would later become ‘growing profits while shrinking waists’.
Tucker had the business acumen. A high school dropout at 17, the Wellington boy went sailing for
a year, but after discovering the life of a professional yachtsman wasn’t for him, he sought out a business opportunity with a food processing company.
“I figured everyone needed to eat,” he says. Over the next few years, he would set up a succession of food and beverage businesses, including seven Hell Pizza franchises.
Benest’s childhood revolved around food — his father ran restaurants in Auckland vineyards — so it was only natural he became a chef.
“I was determined to have my own business, but you know what they say, chefs make awful restaurant owners,” he says.
So he signed with Pizza Hut, which helped him gain New Zealand Qualifications Authority qualifications in business management, and ended up with his own store in Auckland’s East Coast Bays. When he took his staff to eat at Hell and see what the competition was up to, Benest found himself impressed enough to approach Tucker for a job.
While both men did well in Hell — even considering an international franchise — Tucker and Benest decided to do their own thing and create their version of food heaven — fresh, healthy and tasty made-while-you-watch fare, at an affordable price.
Tucker sold the Hell stores and spent a year travelling overseas, gathering ideas from other sandwich and juice bars. “Then we knuckled down for nine months