Max Donaldson’s entrepreneurial success owes its genesis to a herd of contented cows on a Kerikeri farm in Northland. It was their bovine vitality that caught his eye and set him on the path towards founding his own company, GreenKiwi Supplements New Zealand.
The cattle belonged to Max’s neighbour, Ian Sizer. “I was helping Ian tidy up his olive grove, collecting pruned branches to be fed to the livestock. The cows loved the olive leaves and Ian said there’d been a noticeable difference in them, too – they all had shiny coats and looked amazing.”
Around that time, Max had been feeling a bit run down due to school sport exertions and family upheavals. When his mum brought him some energy-boosting natural health supplements, one ingredient on the label caught his eye: “The active ingredient was Queensland-grown olive leaf. That got me thinking, ‘why are these leaves coming from Australia while we're dumping them in our back yard? And why are the cows getting all these health benefits instead of me?!’”
So Max disappeared down an internet rabbit hole and read up on the properties of olive leaf. Words like polyphenols, oleuropein and hydroxytyrosol roll effortlessly off his tongue these days, but science wasn’t his natural playground. He sifted his way through many research documents and discovered that olive leaf was high in active compounds long used for cardiovascular health and to support natural immunity. He also noticed that local businesses were importing leaves from across the globe when there was a primary industry by-product going to waste right here.
19-year-old Max Donaldson researched and launched his own range of supplements. Photo by Jim Huang.
Max was in Year 12 at Kerikeri High School at the time, and he and his classmates were scoping out ideas that might work for the Lion Foundation’s Young Enterprise Scheme (YES). “I remember telling the YES regional coordinator, Gary Larkan, that I might want to get into the natural health space with an olive leaf product and he looked at me and said, ‘Hmm, we’ve never had that before’.”
“I started GreenKiwi Supplements NZ with about $16,000 that I’d saved up from doing odd jobs for various businesses. It was a big risk and it was definitely hard at the start. My family and friends wondered what the hell I was doing. It was certainly an exciting time!”
Max’s hunch paid off. GreenKiwi Supplements NZ became the YES Entrepreneurship Northland Regional Competition Winner in 2020 when Max was only 17. The following year, he was joint winner of the Global Kaitiakitanga Project (run by YES and New Zealand Trade and Enterprise). This gave him the opportunity to promote his flagship product, OliveXtract, at the New Zealand pavilion at EXPO 2020 in Dubai. He was one of the youngest New Zealand entrepreneurs there: “It was an incredible opportunity. It showed me that even if you’re from a small town in the middle of nowhere you can still go places and achieve great things.”
Being the chief executive of his own company did make Max’s adolescence pretty unusual.
“Every afternoon I’d get home from school and go straight into Zoom calls with stakeholders. We had terrible copper Wi-Fi which made it really hard. After the Zooms I’d usually work until well after midnight. When NCEA came along we were given time to go the public library and I’d use the opportunity to have Zoom meetings rather than studying. My grades weren’t that fantastic so doing that for two years wasn’t good for me. I sacrificed a hell of a lot. But like they always say in economics: opportunity costs. Looking back, I probably would have done things differently, but when you’re in that mindset, nothing but the business seems to matter.”
Becoming a CEO while still at high school was a challenge for Max Donaldson. Photo by Jim Huang.
Now 19, Max is in his second year of a Bachelor of Commerce in Marketing at the University of Canterbury. Though still the sole owner of his company, he uses the ‘we’ pronoun instead of ‘I’. When asked who ‘we’ is, he says it’s his way of acknowledging all the mentors and helpers (his family, Ian, Gary).
“There’s no way I’d ever be where I am today without those people.” It’s a mindset he saw modelled by YES: “It takes a village to raise an entrepreneur. There’s no such thing as a self-made millionaire. ”
While OliveXtract capsules were selling well and stocked by 50 independent health retailers around Aotearoa, this year Max made the decision to open his ingredient up to the wider market. “We’re moving into bioactive ingredient supply which means we’re now providing other businesses with our product in bulk form.” He pitched his model of olive waste utilisation to Oliveti Northland Inc (an industry body for Northland olive growers) and had almost 100% uptake of the idea.
Max says there are multiple new partnerships in the wings, including one with a large iwi-based exporting organisation. He attributes the interest in his product to the fact that there’s a genuine functional difference between New Zealand olive leaf and imported sources (the hole in our ozone layer and its resulting high levels of UVB increase the phenolic content of New Zealand produce).
He'll have to move a lot more olive leaf to meet this new ingredient supply model. “I’m wanting to have at least two tonne of leaf out the door by the end of this year.” Won’t those cows up north be grumpy about the disappearance of their olive leaf snacks? “Yes! When I go back into the paddock they won’t be too happy with me.”
Story by Claire Finlayson, photos by Jim Huang for the Winter 2023 issue of AA Directions magazine.
Explore more from AA Directions magazine while you're here:
- Meet an innovative Kiwi company making sustainable, non-toxic paints
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