Meet the Team - James Heslan

Posted on Tuesday, 7 January 2025

Meet James Heslan

Safety Advisor at ANZCO Foods Kōkiri


James is ANZCO Foods Kōkiri's Safety Advisor, assisting with the health, wellbeing, and injury management of people on his site.

He wears many hats in his role - he assesses any new equipment onsite, completing risk assessments to make sure it's safe, and organises training for employees. He works with site health and safety representatives and ANZCO's Group ACC Advisor Deb Parsons to manage everyone's individual needs, wants, and requirements. He's also a senior first aider, so he's the first to respond if anyone has a serious injury on site. He'll make sure the person is comfortable, sort an ambulance or take them to hospital, keep in contact with them throughout their treatment, and help with their injury rehabilitation.

James has been with ANZCO Foods for more than 20 years, first starting out as a knife hand, where he also became a health and safety representative. He then became a New Zealand Industry Training Organisation assessor and knife technician before he was offered his current role as Safety Advisor. He was pleasantly surprised to find that at ANZCO if you work hard to better yourself, there are lots of opportunities available.

Before coming to ANZCO Foods, James worked as a gold panning instructor at Shantytown. He's a two-time New Zealand gold panning champion, winning competitions where he had to get a certain number of gold flakes out of a bucket of gravel in the fastest time. In his spare time, James gets his creative fix by writing fiction, and playing guitar or the blues harp (harmonica). After a busy day he'll go for a walk around Cobden Tip with his wife.

Despite being a two-time champion, however, James says his biggest claim to fame was surviving an attack from a hippopotamus while on safari with his sister in Zimbabwe. They were cruising up the Zambesi River in a group of canoes, and they spotted three hippos standing on the riverbank. One dropped down into the water and was impossible to see, and the guide at the front of the fleet yelled for them to paddle. The hippo surfaced right next to them, and their boat operator bailed, so James and his sister were left alone on the boat! They figured it was probably a good idea to bail out of the boat too, and swam for the riverbank, which was about two metres away. Eventually when the hippo had swum away and they'd gotten back in the boat, they noticed two holes in the side of the canoe where the hippo had attacked it - so they used chewing gum and plasters from the first aid kid to patch them up, and then kept going!

Fun facts

  • Favourite knock-knock joke?
    There are no good knock-knock jokes
  • Favourite flavour of chocolate?
    Whittaker's Fruit and Nut
  • Marmite or Vegemite?
    Neither - they're only good for axle grease
  • If you could visit any place in the world, where would it be?
    The Sahara Desert - he'd cross it on a camel!
  • Favourite book of all time?
    The Hobbit, or Tarzan of the Apes
Go back to all articles