New Zealand once went a full year without Marmite and the whole country lost its mind.
Marmageddon, the papers called it, and for about twelve months from March 2012, the Kiwi nation of four and a half million people simply could not buy the stuff. They get through 640 tonnes of it a year. The behaviour that followed was not dignified.
This is Kiwi Marmite, mind. Made by Sanitarium, different recipe, sweeter and milder and a bit more vegetable than the Burton article. Have you ever tried it? I would not swap. But they grew up on it, it is theirs, and losing it hurt them exactly as much as losing ours would hurt us, so I will keep the digs to a minimum for the rest of this piece.
How a country runs out of a spread
Christchurch was hit by a run of earthquakes from September 2010 onwards, including the February 2011 quake that killed 185 people and the aftershocks that December. Sanitarium’s Marmite factory at Papanui was damaged. Production limped along for a while and then stopped altogether, and on 19 March 2012 the company announced the closure.
There was only one factory. Every jar of New Zealand Marmite came out of that one building, so when it shut the tap shut with it. Existing stock washed through the supply chain over a few weeks and then the shelves were bare.
The panic was very good
People bought whatever was left. Then the people who had bought whatever was left started selling it to each other on TradeMe, where jars reached $60 apiece.
The press went at it with enormous enjoyment, somewhere between rationing gags and sincere columns about national identity. Sanitarium’s general manager, Pierre van Heerden, drew the short straw of fronting it up and telling everyone when supply might return.
Mid-July, he said. About four months.
It took a year
The building needed structural strengthening rather than patching up, which is a much bigger job, and a much slower one when you are trying to do it in a city where every trade is booked solid rebuilding everything else. The line came back the following year. Marmite returned to New Zealand shelves on 20 March 2013, almost exactly twelve months after the closure was announced and about three times longer than anyone had been told to expect.
Sanitarium got more affection out of that year of absence than a decade of advertising would have bought them, which I suspect was not much consolation at the time.
Why it still matters
Marmageddon is the benchmark now. Every time supply wobbles anywhere in the world somebody reaches for it, and they are usually right to.
We have had our own scares, though nothing on that scale. The Tesco pricing row in October 2016 briefly threatened supply and was sorted within days. In 2020 the breweries closed and the yeast went with them, which was a real squeeze with a real cause. And in 2026 Marmite was delisted outright in Singapore and Malaysia, which is the closest thing to Marmageddon since: an entire market gone, no return date offered.
What links all of them is that Marmite comes from one place. New Zealand had a single factory and lost everything when it cracked. Ours is made in Burton upon Trent, where it has always been made, for solid historical reasons to do with sitting next door to the breweries whose spent yeast is the raw material.
I am not predicting anything. Burton is not on a fault line and the comparison only stretches so far. But a product that depends on one building and one by-product of somebody else’s industry is a more delicate proposition than a hundred and twenty-four unbroken years makes it look.
What was Marmageddon?
Marmageddon was the name given by the New Zealand press to the Marmite shortage that ran from March 2012 to March 2013. Sanitarium closed its Papanui factory in Christchurch on 19 March 2012 because of earthquake damage, and since it was the only plant making New Zealand Marmite, the country ran out entirely.
How long did the New Zealand Marmite shortage last?
About twelve months. Production stopped when the factory closed in March 2012, and Marmite returned to New Zealand shelves on 20 March 2013. The original estimate had been mid-July 2012, so the shortage lasted roughly three times longer than first announced.
Why did New Zealand run out of Marmite?
Sanitarium’s Papanui factory in Christchurch was damaged by the Canterbury earthquake sequence, particularly the February 2011 quake and the December 2011 aftershocks. It was the only facility producing New Zealand Marmite, so its closure stopped all supply. The building needed structural strengthening rather than simple repair, which extended the outage well beyond initial estimates.
Is New Zealand Marmite the same as British Marmite?
No. New Zealand Marmite is made by Sanitarium to a different recipe and tastes noticeably sweeter and milder than the British version made by Unilever in Burton upon Trent. They are separate products that share a name for historical trademark reasons.
