Sarah Hedger, director of deliciousness (founder and creative) of Yum, discusses their new ‘thoughtfully crafted’ Bushline Breakfasts.  

Why is breakfast such an important meal?

I believe each of us can thrive when we choose to start the day with a great breakfast. It sets us up for the whole day, helps sustain energy, reduces the lows and sugar and caffeine cravings. Eat too many quick-digesting carbs for breakfast and the result is spiked insulin levels and you’re hungry within an hour. 

What makes someone a breakfast expert? 

Studying food and its effects on our bodies has been my longtime interest and passion. When I was 17 I started racing mountain bikes, and with all the training I was eating a lot of white carbs, which gave me awful stomach aches, cravings and lows. I began connecting what I ate to how I felt and, taking it a step further, to how I performed. I went on to study nutrition at university, and cooking for professional athletes, which furthered my knowledge of good nutrition. 

What advice do you have to help someone choose the right breakfast and foods for the outdoors?

Choose foods that will sustain you! This means a meal with good protein, good-quality wholefood carbs, healthy fat and fibre. All are important, but it’s the protein and fat that make us feel full and satisfied for longer. We perform better if we eat this type of complete, high-quality meal. 

Choose snacks that offer all the nutrients of a complete meal, such as hard-boiled eggs, celery and peanut butter, scroggin, nuts of all varieties, cheese, protein and veggies in a wrap, hearty sandwiches, protein cookies – and dark chocolate, of course!

What does a balanced breakfast feel like?

A balanced breakfast feels great not only while you’re eating it, but also for hours after. One of the comments that we continually get from people eating our breakfasts is how little they need to eat to feel satisfied; they aren’t thinking about food again until 1 or 2pm. 

Why did you make Bushline Breakfasts, and how are they different?

We are an outdoor family who loves nature and venturing into the hills. Once we started noticing the amount of single-use plastics people were using in the outdoors, we wanted to offer a simple solution to reduce this.

We asked our outdoor adventure friends, and over 90 per cent of them said they carry some kind of bowl, cup or pot – and therein lies the solution. We wanted to create a meal that no longer required the packaging to be the bowl, so we made the Bushline Breakfasts instant, requiring no cooking or rehydrating – just mixed in a bowl with water. This simple process of removing the need to rehydrate a meal in its package means that our meals don’t contribute to the plastic in landfills and oceans.

The packaging we use is also made in Aotearoa and is home compostable, which means it uses 98 per cent less plastic than ‘forever’ plastic packaging that is rarely reused and is not recyclable. 

The Bushlines pack in light and pack out light, are nutrient dense and are a more earth-friendly solution – something we can all be proud to be a part of.