Raw Balance Vegan Deli & Health Shop

Rating: 1

We ate lunch here in October 2025.

Mac’n’cheese
Tofu potato gherkin salad
Almond finger

It ain’t easy being Business Andy & The Fee-Rex. We eat a lot of bad food. But today something very rare occurred - we walked in, took a look around, thought ‘yeah nah’ and walked out. What followed was an emotionally tumultuous episode, wrestling with our integrity and commitment to randomness on one hand, and our desire to not eat disgusting food on the other hand. Integrity won, and in we went.

Raw Balance Vegan Deli & Health Shop has a sign outside saying it’s a cafe, but it’s only just meeting the requirements. It has a tiny cabinet of food comprising six salads and six sweet things. The attendant proudly claimed that this is the only place in Turangi you can get healthy food, and their sign stated “raw food is not a fad, it’s the future”. What is it to be raw food? Is cooked pasta raw? Is cooked potato and tofu raw? Because that’s what we ate. Perhaps raw just means cold and flavourless, in which case our meal was raw indeed. The mac’n’cheese was an insult to the name. There’s no way there was any cheese involved, in fact their website states that all their food is vegan. But this didn’t have vegan cheese in it either. Maybe a little bit of nutritional yeast, but the dominant flavour was parsley. The potato salad was better, but definitely still bad. The dominant flavour there was gherkin, but again this should not be construed as praise.

The best was the almond finger, which it turns out is some kind of cacao chocolate finger thing, maybe containing almond butter or a little almond meal? While we wouldn’t be buying this again, it at least wasn’t difficult to eat. A saving grace was that what we bought was very small, and the New World over the road was all to happy to sell us oven pizza full of meat, dairy and refined ingredients as a middle finger to the raw food movement.