15 Jun 2025 The KZN family who created a nougat empire
Wedgewood is one of SA’s most well-known and beloved sweets brands today. However, the story starts with humble beginnings in Gilly Walter’s family kitchen…..
During the late 1990s, Gilly Walters was in a difficult position. Her husband had been diagnosed with cancer, and they had to sell the family farm.
To make ends meet, she started baking products and selling locally sourced cheeses, which she sold at the farmers market in Pietermaritzburg.
At one of these markets, Walters and her husband met Christopher Duigan, who is widely regarded as one of South Africa’s foremost concert pianists. This encounter sparked a new idea. Walters decided to hold concerts for music lovers at her family home, sometimes hosting up to 100 guests.
Duigan entertained audiences with his knowledge of classical music and incredible piano skills, while Walters would delight guests with dishes created in her kitchen in their Hilton family home.
“With her passion for good food, our Mum created her innovative recipes to serve to her guests,” says Paul Walters, CEO of Wedgewood Crafted Confectionery.
Walters had travelled to France as an au pair in her youth and decided to try to recreate the Montelimar nougat as an evening alternative to dessert.
Montelimar nougat, a traditional French confection, is a soft, chewy candy primarily made from honey, almonds, and egg whites. It is known for its delicate taste and unique texture, often with additional ingredients like pistachios and signature lavender honey.
Although it tasted great, the recipe was a disaster. The first batch had to be served frozen to stop it from running off the plate.
She wasn’t deterred, though, and went back to the drawing board. Walters toiled over the stove for five months before she perfected the Wedgewood recipe.
“Our family kitchen became a constant stream of nougat to be tasted, pulled and prodded by anyone who stepped over the threshold,” Walters says.
“Eventually, Gilly perfected her well-loved nougat recipe and packed it into baskets to sell at the local farmer’s market.”
Suffice it to say the response to her newly perfected recipe was better. In fact, Wedgewood still uses the same recipe today.
“Such was the demand for our Mum’s honey-rich nougat, and later her world-first nougat biscuits, that production grew fast,” he says. “Her three sons jumped in to stir pots and help where needed. And that’s how Wedgewood Nougat began.”
Brilliant success
Today, Wedgewood Crafted Confectionery is one of the most popular nougat brands in the country, and Walters’ touch can still be found all over the business.
Wedgewood remains a family business and still makes nougat the same way she made it, in small batches with great care on their farm.
“Our nougat is still handmade on our farm, and we work with the same passion and commitment that we always have,” Walters says.
At the same time, Wedgewood is working on creating exciting new recipes while keeping a very particular eye on quality, the way Walters did.
The Wedgewood Farm is a decommissioned dairy farm, not far from the Drakensberg Mountains. It is home to the business’ bespoke nut-cracking facility, the Wedgewood Bakery and Makery and the Wedgewood Farm Shop.
Today, more than 25 years after its founding, the business has five emporiums nationwide, at the V&A Waterfront, Parkhurst, Lourensford, Ballito, and in the Midlands…..
Daily Investor: Read the full article here
Some more background…. here is an article your ed wrote 18 years ago in July 2007 for SA Food Review magazine!
Sweet family affair
Entrepreneurs are a special breed and they are increasingly the innovation drivers in the South African food industry. And we need more of them because they create jobs and because you can’t buy their sort of passion with a pay cheque. Brenda Neall discovered a remarkable family of entrepreneurs at Wedgewood Nougat in the beautiful KZN Midlands.
THE arty-crafty-foodie Midlands Meander in KwaZulu-Natal, covering a broad rural ramble north of Pietermaritzburg, has become a ‘must do’ for any visitor to this picturesque corner of South Africa – and there’s one name linked to it that is perhaps more famous than the route itself: Gilly Walters and her acclaimed Wedgewood honey nougat.
Gilly and her family might not like this description, because more genuinely unpretentious and just-so-darn-nice people would be hard to find, but it’s the truth, so they’ll just have to live with it.
Some years ago, Gilly rose to renown on the Midlands Meander through Touchwood, the family’s rose and veggie farm, and which later sprouted a popular shop and restaurant. Family and food are Gilly’s two great passions, and all her endeavours have involved both – and even as youngsters, her three sons, Jon, Steve and Paul, were always part of the team and fast learnt the meaning of hard graft.
At Touchwood’s peak, cancer sadly struck Taffy Walters, Gilly’s land surveyor husband, and so they sold up the farm and moved to Howick. The ebullient Taffy (the ‘old bullet’ as his clan fondly refers to him), declined to succumb and in recovery turned his attention to a 60ha mielie field adjacent Hilton College that he planned to develop into a country estate (‘A kibbutz for his mates,’ quips Gilly), dividing it up into nine freehold erven for homesteads and with most being common land devoted in perpetuity to a proclaimed nature reserve and a safe refuge to breed the endangered indigenous oribi buck.
Nine year’s ago it was a lifestyle property concept way ahead of its time, and those who eschewed Taffy’s offer to buy into his crazy scheme still berate their shortsightedness: this part of KZN is now hot real estate.
Set between two forests, the Walters called their new home ‘Wedgewood’ and the ever-resourceful Gilly devised a new enterprise; to use their acoustically-attuned house as a music venue extraordinaire and host intimate classical soirées that soon had guests and musicians, many of them international names, flocking to Hilton for these unusual and evocative evenings.
Gilly used her culinary skills to cater for the concert audiences and it was at one of these concerts that she made her first batch of Wedgewood nougat – Mozart’s favourite food – and was later encouraged by smitten guests to consider producing it commercially. Gilly’s kitchen stove soon became a hub of sticky white activity and the heart of an exciting home industry.
The recipe was perfected over time – nougat is not exactly an easy thing to make and work with – and soon sales at a local farmers’ market and other niche outlets began to take off. The Walters moved out of their kitchen into a small factory set up in their adjacent workshops, and Taffy reclaimed his evenings and his hands, much abused by the labours of hand-cutting endless batches of nougat.
Eight years on, Wedgewood Nougat has become a select confectionery item on national shelves, it has found a growing list of export customers in Japan and Europe and expanded into a new 1 000m2 greenfield factory across the valleys from Wedgewood at Birnamwood, sited in rural splendour overlooking the lush fields of Cedara Agricultural College.
The close-knit Walters family (parents, three sons, three daughters-in-law and an ever growing number of grandchildren) all live on the Wedgewood Estate and all but two daughters-in-law work in the factory — Steve is GM, Jon is an engineering genius, while Paul handles the marketing and sales. Gilly and Taffy have toned down into ‘sort-of’ semi-retirement and called it a day on their concerts (250 later), but their kitchen still is a focal point whether it’s entertaining friends, researching new products or just enjoying a working breakfast or lunch.
Why has Wedgewood been such a success?
‘It’s a great product! I think the nougat market is a remarkable phenomenon in South Africa, first started by The Coachhouse in Tzaneen and then Sally Williams really raised its profile,’ notes Paul. ‘Specialist nougat has evolved into a trendy and renowned niche, and such is its quality, we have proved we can hold our own in the confectionery world. But also discerning consumers here are a fantastic market base; they’re willing to try something new and if they like it, they’ll buy it.’
With Wedgewood stepping out of home-industry mode, the Walters Bros don’t deny the challenges in scaling up and moving into the export arena.
‘The business really grew organically initially, without much defined planning,’ says Paul. ‘We’ve now had to be more structured and set our vision, mission and goals. We’ve also recognised the importance of quality and safety credentials for overseas customers, even if we’re a small operation, and we should be HACCP, ISO 9001 and ISO 22000 certified by August.’
In attaining these tickets, Paul only has plaudits for the help and financing offered by the KZN SEDA (Small Enterprise Development Agency and an arm of the DTI) in reaching this ambitious end. They have also tapped into the DTI’s support for exhibiting at international food shows such as SIAL and ANUGA.
The Walters, while investing substantially in the business and building capacity, don’t ever want their brand to lose its home-crafted, hand-made appeal: ‘Quality over quantity is always a dilemma, but we’re interested in slow, sustainable growth,’ says Paul. ‘We don’t want to get too big. And we’ll never compromise on our quality ingredients: 36% nut and a 12% honey content, no preservatives or added gelatine, and small-batch manufacturing process. Essentially, Wedgewood is a quality nougat, and we aim to keep it that way.’
Wedgewood offers six nougat/nut variants in 55g and 110g bars, bon-bons and 110g gift boxes. With sustainability a Walters’ watchword, nothing goes to waste, and the egg yolks and nougat offcuts go into a secondary line, delicious shortbread biscuits, dubbed Angels, made using one of Gilly Walters’ own original recipes, of course.
The factory staff complement numbers about 30 for this hands-on operation, but some automation is improving efficiencies. For instance, Jon’s engineering talents have created mechanical rotary cutters for the onerous cutting duties, and packaging has been streamlined with a new Marden Edwards overwrapper and auto-labeller.
Wedgewood’s brand-enhancing point-of-sale display stands are interesting; they’re made on the farm of wood from alien saligna that has been cleared from the Walters’ two properties. This is a typical Walters’ touch, all devotees of environmental concern and stewardship.
Steve, (dubbed ‘Sustainable Steve’ by his brothers) in fact, has some novel long-term plans to make the factory site fully environmentally-friendly and mostly-self sustaining.
His dream, already in the construction, will see water being harvested from rain and treated prior to private use in the family homes planned next door and in aquaculture (tilapia fish) ponds. This water will, in turn, be ‘cleansed’ from its nitrates as food for hydroponic vegetable tunnels, and recirculated back to the fish ponds. All the organic waste will go to compost, which will both heat up water for the fish ponds and fertilise the gardens and orchard.
Effluent goes into a submerged sewerage treatment plant that will convert organic matter, through a series of bacterial anaerobic chambers, into available nitrates to feed into orchards. Ultimately, the fish, fruit and vegetables will feed their own families.
‘This is the joy of a family business – it gives one the opportunity to pursue different objectives,’ comments Paul. ‘Our company’s bottom line is not primarily financial, but also about meaningful personal growth for ourselves and our staff. Wedgewood provides far more than a salary – our lifeblood keeps us together and it has let us bring our passions into our business,’ he concludes. ENDS