The first echoes of Fisher & Paykel began in New Zealand, when Olive Paykel asked her husband to import a new appliance – a Crosley refrigerator – she’d seen in the American Ladies' Home Journal. She wasn’t the only person who wanted one, and with this popularity, so began a fast-growing appliance importing business run by Olive’s son Maurice Paykel and her son-in-law, Woolf Fisher. This was the beginning of Fisher & Paykel.

When the New Zealand government banned imports of manufactured products a few years later, Fisher and Paykel responded. Rather than closing up shop, we changed our entire approach, establishing a factory to assemble appliances ourselves under license to companies such as Kelvinator.

Creating a culture of difference.

The answer lay in people. The founders’ pioneering spirit encouraged a culture that challenged conventional appliance design and production systems. By putting a focus on understanding how people wanted to live, we embarked on our journey to deliver world-leading innovations that truly improve people’s lives. We started by creating plastic refrigerator liners and insulation made from polyurethane foam – the world’s first commercial version of this technology.

Running with the bulls.

Around the same time, in 1955, Fisher & Paykel acquired cooking range manufacturer H. E. Shacklock Ltd, which dominated the domestic marketing in New Zealand. Their manufacturing history dates back to 1873, and this heritage shapes our approach to cooking to this day.

Nga taaonga tuku iho.

For a sweet treat with a twist, you can’t go past this simple recipe for chocolate bark. It is sure to wow, but is also incredibly easy to make – especially if you’re lucky enough to be using an induction cooktop, where the heat control is so precise so you can melt the chocolate directly in the pot without any need for a double boiler.

I tested the recipe out in the Social Kitchen at the F&P Dunedin office, and the feedback from the hordes of hungry engineers here was a resounding thumbs up.

The recipe below is for two different flavours, and I used Whittaker’s Dark Ghana 72% Cocoa block for both of these recipes as my starting point. The first flavour, chilli and sea salt, works really well with a bitter dark chocolate base; the second flavour, raspberry, pistachio and cardamom, also works well both with the bitterness of a dark chocolate base, however it also goes beautifully with the vanilla tones of a white chocolate base.