Topflite: Winner in the 2025 Best Places to Work™ Awards

We’re absolutely stoked to be named winners in the ‘Spotlight Awards’ category for Community & Regional Impact at the 2025 Best Places to Work™ Awards.

This national recognition celebrates organisations across Aotearoa that are shaping workplaces where people and performance thrive together, and Topflite is honoured to be among them.

"We set the goal a few years back to be the workplace of choice in Ōamaru so we are very pleased to have been acknowledged.” 
- Greg Webster, Managing Director & Owner

A group of us donned our best threads and headed for the Big Smoke in Auckland for the finals where we were part of an audience of 400 leaders from organisations across New Zealand.

As the only Otago-based workplace, and the only pet food producer, we are very proud to sit alongside some of New Zealand’s best known companies as 2025 Best Places to Work™ Awards winners, including overall winner Sharesies.

Formed in 1975, Topflite is still proudly led by a leadership team that includes the founding Mitchell and Webster families, with strong family values ingrained in the way we do things.

To enter the Awards, businesses send surveys to all NZ-based employees, with questions covering nine pillars of employee experience. One of these is ‘Connection to Purpose’, which Topflite promotes through the maintenance of a local predator trapping line, an annual Green Friday native planting day held in lieu of a Black Friday sale, and the funding of national conservation work through The SOAR Initiative.

‘Growth and Innovation’ is another pillar we were scored against. Our staff have many opportunities to feed ideas into product innovation for New Zealand pets and wild birds.

Input from the team helped to refine our best-selling Nectar Feeder, designed to feed native birds safely and hygienically. 

“We worked on improving the design for nectarivorous birds like tūī and bellbirds over the years, and the input from staff was invaluable. Everyone got a feeder before we released them and now we all compare notes on which birds have been visiting,” said Webster.

The team’s latest task is trialling new flavours of freeze-dried dog meat from Topflite’s little brother label, Hound. 

"We set the goal a few years back to be the workplace of choice in Ōamaru so we are very proud to have been acknowledged,” says Webster.
 
The Best Places to Work™ Awards have been running for 20 years, with the aim of elevating workplaces across the country.