Go Wild!

For more than ten years Whakatāne’s Local Wild Food Festival has been serving up the downright delicious, all while helping to educate young and old about the glorious kai that is all around us. It’s back in 2025 with a renewed focus on sustainability and appreciating the resources of our natural environment - and it’s also the perfect excuse to hit the Bay for a weekend you’ll never want to end!

The Local Wild Food Festival was the brainchild of founder Bill Mason and kicked off in Eastbourne, Wellington, in 2008. The basic premise was to celebrate abundant wild food by creating dishes based on natural ingredients: kai moana from the seas, produce from the land, whatever a hunter could harvest - it could all be used to create a signature dish to wow a panel of local and specialist judges and get us all thinking differently about what we eat and where we source our food.

It was a winning recipe indeed and the Festival grew to include multiple locations around Aotearoa New Zealand and an incredible nine countries across the globe. COVID put a dampener on the Festival, as it did to so many events, but there really is no keeping a good thing down and the Whakatāne event - first held in 2013 - continues to inspire and promote understanding, appreciation and sustainability of the resources in our natural environment.

“Whakatāne has plentiful native bush, rivers, lakes, ocean and harbour inlets – all teeming with wild food,” says Kim Fort, Senior Events Development Advisor at Whakatāne District Council. “Fishing, diving, hunting, and growing is part of our DNA, and with a 50% Māori population there is a strong interest in kai Māori - harvesting, foraging and traditional Rongoā practices, which provide really great learning opportunities for the wider community.”

“The event centres around cooking challenges where participants gather local wild food to craft dishes for judging. Categories include best wild ingredient, best pest, best of the sea, best Kai Māori and more. The judging panel marks dishes on flavour, use of wild ingredients, the story of the dish/wild food and effort. In the past the panel has included media personalities and kai experts like chefs Joe McLeod and Anne Thorp, Tūī Keenan from the Hunting with Tūī show, Owen Boynton, Toa Hunter Gatherer and Mawera Karetai, a local wild kai personality.”

Accompanying the challenge is a wider festival featuring wild food-themed menus from food trucks, demonstrations, crafts, weaving, and environmental groups. More than 70 unique demonstrations on culinary topics such as beast breakdowns, hāngī, food preservation, and permaculture have been delivered since the Festival’s inception, educating festival crowds of over 2600 people.

A relatively recent addition to the Festival has been The Mystery Box Challenge, which sees competitors given a box of wild ingredients - they have no idea what is included till they open the box - and have 45 minutes to create a culinary masterpiece. “The Mystery Box Challenge has proven really popular with groups of three to four signing up on the day!” says Kim.

“Fishing, diving, hunting, and growing is part of our DNA, and with a 50% Māori population there is a strong interest in kai Māori”

“In the past the boxes have included everything from venison, to seafoods, mussels and oysters, and piko piko and other wild herbs, so it’s a really fun challenge for corporate groups, families or friends! Sessions roll out throughout the day, every hour on the hour, so you can get into the vibe of the Festival, get your courage up and get stuck in using our on-site kitchens - and hopefully you can win something exciting from the prize table!”

But you don’t have to get your game on to have fun at the Local Wild Food Festival. There are kai demonstrations and guided samplings of native plants so you can start to explore your own wild food journey, and demonstrations on the weaving of food baskets. Cooking demonstrations have included traditional Māori Rongoa medicine, permaculture, rēwena bread, composting, kūmara growing, venison/pork beast butchering, and fish filleting. And perhaps the best part is that there are wild food samples including goat, peacock, wild pork, kahawai and even crickets - all cooked over open fires.

There are kai demonstrations and guided samplings of native plants so you can start to explore your own wild food journey

And around all this swirls live music, sea breezes and good vibes, under ancient Pōhutukawa trees at Ōhope - voted New Zealand’s best-loved beach - just over the hill from Whakatāne. The Festival gets underway at midday on Saturday, 22 February, tickets are $15 (including booking fee) for early birds, $20 on the day with children under sixteen getting in for free. We’ll see you there!