Queensland lettuce growers Geoffrey and Anne Story stopped selling to supermarkets 30 years ago, tired of riding the roller-coaster of being price takers.
“I didn’t like putting a lot of product in the ground, spending a lot of money employing people and you actually didn’t know whether you’re going to make money this week or next,” Mr Story said.
“It got to this stage where you could go a whole year and not make money — that’s not a position I ever want to be in again.”
A variety of salad greens are grown by the Story family. (ABC Landline: Cam Lang)
These days, the couple look at every lettuce plant across their four farms, near Toowoomba in south-east Queensland, and know where it’s going and what they’ll be paid for it.
When the Storys were searching for new customers, fast-food franchising was taking off overseas, as was demand for pre-prepared, fresh-cut vegetables.
They pioneered a new market in Australia, washing, sanitising, coring, slicing, and bagging lettuce for fast food restaurants.
The Story family’s produce being processed. (ABC Landline: Cam Lang)
The value-adding business started off modestly with basic slicing equipment and staff wielding knives.
Now, 50 employees work alongside state-of-the-art equipment.
“We supply about 2,500 stores across the whole of the eastern seaboard of Australia, so that’s all the big brands you can imagine, pretty much every sandwich, every burger in Queensland will have our product on it,” Mr Story said.
The couple’s son Nathan works for the family business using his training as a mechatronics engineer, with skills in mechanical, software and electrical engineering, as well as robotics.
Nathan Story is a trained mechatronics engineer who uses his skills in the family business. (ABC News: Cam Lang)
Nathan Story said his family now had stable demand, and supply and price contracts were negotiated annually.
“It helps us plan and invest so that we can do our job better and more efficiently, and it absolutely works better with long-term relationships, as opposed to, today we’ve got a customer for it and tomorrow we don’t,” he said.
Harvesting goals
The Story family deliver bags of fresh ready-to-eat lettuce 52 weeks of the year, and McDonald’s has been a customer for five years.
“Making sure it shows up and that we get supply is critical, and that’s not easy in produce, whether it’s a rain event or a hail event,” McDonald’s senior director of supply chain Tom Mahony said.
“There’s always something, but the Story family have done a good job to make sure that supply turns up.”
The 70 staff on the Story family’s farms plant half a million iceberg lettuce each week.
“We do about 18 million heads of iceberg a year,” Geoffrey Story said.
“Across the properties, we’re planting every day, transplanting seedlings every day, and every day we’re harvesting.
“If we’re planting 100,000 heads a day, we’re harvesting 100,000.”
The Storys opened a new processing factory four years ago, which is run by Nathan Story.
“Most machines have their own brain keeping watch over what they’re doing, and then over the top of that we have other controllers making sure that as a group, everything’s happening the right way,” he said.
The family’s salad greens are sent to fast food businesses and restaurants. (ABC Landline: Cam Lang)
Global brands like Subway, McDonald’s, Hungry Jacks and KFC have high safety standards, so the factory has three different machines to detect and eject marked lettuce and foreign objects like stones.
The family thought the factory would not need extending for a decade, but just four years after opening, they are now planning to spend millions to increase capacity.
“The next stage will give us roughly a 50 per cent increase in capacity but also improve our flexibility, so we’ll have the ability to do more complex products, and improve our ability to short runs,” Nathan Story said.
Growing demand
Anne and Geoffrey Story are in their 60s, but have no plans to slow down.
They have just bought a new fresh-cut fruit, vegetable, salad and meal solutions preparation business in Brisbane.
“It’s an enormous opportunity, we’re only just touching on the edges at the moment,” Ms Story said.
Workers harvest lettuce at the Story family’s farms near Toowoomba. (ABC Landline: Cam Lang)
She was shocked at how big the market for diced, sliced, chopped, shredded and peeled fruit and vegetables had become.
Ms Story said the food service world had radically changed, with more cafes, restaurants, aged-care homes, and small supermarkets outsourcing food preparation due to staffing and space constraints.
“We’re seeing many [food service businesses] quite prepared to buy a processed product so that they don’t have to do that particular function in-house,”she said.
Lettuce on the farm is grown to order. (ABC News: Cam Lang)
“They might do the final cooking or they might do the plating up, but the preparation is actually done off-site by businesses such as ours.
“It’s exciting — we’re going into the next step now.”
One thing all three family members agree is that they are never going back to planting a crop and crossing their fingers someone will pay them enough to make a living.
“All the business we do in the future is going to be some sort of agreed supply and price,” Geoffrey Story said.
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