About ThrivingKiwi
ThrivingKiwi is an independent New Zealand guide to wellness, growing your own food, and natural building.
It exists because most of what you find searching for this stuff is written for Americans, priced in US dollars, and recommends products you cannot buy here. The rest is written by the brands selling them. Neither is much use if you are standing in a pharmacy in Napier trying to work out which magnesium to pick up.
Nourish, Restore, Build
Nourish — Supplements, vitamins, gut health, probiotics, nootropics and collagen. What is actually on New Zealand shelves, what it costs in NZD, and what the evidence supports. Which is often less than the label suggests.
Restore — Wellness experiences across Aotearoa: hot pools, cold plunge, infrared saunas, float tanks and recovery practices. Plus growing and preserving your own food, written for New Zealand’s seasons rather than the northern hemisphere’s.
Build — Hempcrete, earth building, earthships, recycled materials, and the consent pathways that go with them. This is the section with the fewest competitors and the most people getting it wrong, so it gets the most scrutiny.
They are less unrelated than they look. Each is the same question from a different angle: what does living well here actually take, and how much of what you are told about it holds up.
How this site works
Every product, price and pack size is checked against a live New Zealand retailer or the brand’s own page before it is published, and the date it was checked appears on the page. Prices move. If a figure looks old, it probably is — check before you buy.
If a claim cannot be verified, it does not go in. Not softened, not hedged into something vaguer — left out, usually with a line saying why. You will find sentences here that read “we couldn’t find evidence for this”. That is not filler, it is the finding.
Corrections are published on the page, and dated. Not quietly edited out. If a recommended product turns out not to exist, or a price was wrong, or a claim did not survive a second look, it says so where the original claim was. In September 2026 every article on this site was re-checked against live sources and what did not hold up was corrected in public. That is now standing practice, not a one-off.
Citations go to the actual paper — not to a write-up of one, and never to a study nobody here has read.
Regulatory claims go to the primary source. Consent requirements, building standards, medicine classifications, hemp rules — checked against MBIE, BRANZ, Standards NZ, Medsafe or MPI directly, because secondary write-ups go stale and this is the material where being wrong costs a reader real money.
What this site isn’t
It is not medical advice, and nobody writing it is a doctor, dietitian or registered nutritionist. Where a question needs a clinician, it says so instead of guessing. Always talk to your GP or a registered health professional before starting new supplements.
It is not a shop. Nothing is sold here directly.
How it makes money
Some links are affiliate links. Buy through one and the site may earn a small commission, at no extra cost to you.
That arrangement does not decide what gets recommended. Plenty of articles here recommend the cheapest option, an option with no affiliate program, or nothing at all. The natural building section earns nothing whatsoever — there is no affiliate program for hempcrete.
Nobody pays to be included. No brand has been given copy approval, and none will be.
Who writes it
ThrivingKiwi is written and researched by Reece Clements, based in Hawke’s Bay. Background: a BE (Hons) in Chemical Engineering from the University of Canterbury, then energy efficiency engineering, infrastructure projects and logistics. The natural building section draws on having built a tiny home rather than only having read about it.
He also runs Mahi Digital, a web design and SEO business in Hawke’s Bay. Worth stating plainly: if you are reading reviews on a site with affiliate links, written by someone who does SEO for a living, you should know that before weighing them — not after looking him up.
Corrections
If something here is wrong, say so: hello@thrivingkiwi.co.nz. Corrections are welcome and they get made. If you are a New Zealand brand, grower, builder or association and this site has got something wrong about your work, that is the address.
Working in the NZ wellness, eco-build or sustainable materials space and want to collaborate? Work with us →