Farm-baked rusks are hot off the shelves

Almost two decades ago, Heather van Zyl began baking rusks in her kitchen for neighbours and friends. Today she sells 60t across five provinces. Mike Burgess visited her recently on the farm Van Zylsrust near Lady Grey in the Eastern Cape to better understand her secret to success.

- Mike Burgess

Heather van Zyl’s late mother, Joey, taught her to bake the perfect rusk when she was still a teenager in the Eastern Cape district of Ugie. It was a treasured skill that decades later she used as the cornerstone for her Heavanz (an amalgamation of the names Heather and Van Zyl) rusk business.

Besides the skill of being able to produce delicious rusks using the secret family recipe, an added ingredient to her success has undoubtedly been her work ethic. This is maybe best reflected by the fact that despite being a teacher and with no experience in the bakery business, she has managed to consolidate the successful Heavanz rusk brand across large swathes of the country. “I have never been able to sit still,’’ she explains. “I just can’t do nothing.’’

TURNING TO RUSKS 

Heavanz Rusks is a product of Heather’s industrious nature, which was responsible for a couple of farm-based enterprises she had launched after settling on Van Zylsrust with husband, Pierre Van Zyl, in 1989. In fact, by the early 1990s, she was speculating with Angora goats after a crash in the Mohair price opened an opportunity to source goats from disillusioned mohair producers and then sell them for slaughter in the former Transkei. But when Mohair prices stabilised, the once-lucrative opportunity vanished overnight.

She then began breeding and slaughtering pigs in the mid-1990s and was soon supplying pork into the former Transkei. However, after a decade of lucrative trade, the individual who purchased the bulk of her pork began to slaughter his own pigs. She was never to recover from this unexpected turn of events and sold all her pigs in 2004.