In a factory at Monarto, east of Adelaide, Kelly Johnson is filling packets with all sorts of dehydrated fruit and veggies, in a business where food specs are pretty easy to meet.
“We take marked, small, scratched, cracked, you name it,” she said.
“If I would eat it, I’ll use it and I’ll pretty much eat anything.”
Kelly is the founder of Woodlane Orchard, which sells snacks, meals and garnishes made from second-grade or surplus fresh produce.
It’s a business she almost fell into after leaving her job in Adelaide four years ago and returning to her hometown of Mypolonga.
“I had a friend who was throwing away one tonne of dried peaches a year, so I said to him I’d go to a couple of markets and I would sell the peaches for him,” she said.
“So I value-added, a little bit of chocolate dipping and they went. So then my husband said, ‘Well, now you’ll have to get a job’, and I thought I don’t really want to do that.
“So I looked around, [there was] lots of produce and decided I’d have a go at a few other things.”
Sceptics become the believers
Citrus grower Brian Martin was one of her early suppliers, keen to keep his second-grade oranges off the ground even though he was initially sceptical about Kelly’s business.
“[I thought] oh that’ll last five minutes and she’ll be out the door,” he said.
“But she’s gone bigger and better than I ever thought.”
Stone fruit and citrus got Kelly’s fledgling business going, especially when dehydrated cocktail garnishes took off a few years ago.
But in winter, when more veggies started rolling in, the former scout leader decided to mix things up and take the business in a new direction.
“I started thinking about how I had utilised vegetables in the past with my scouts to make lightweight meals for hiking and I thought I could just adopt that same philosophy and make meals,” she said.
While the idea was inspired by her experience with the scouts, farmers influenced the types of meals she made.
“I had a farmer say, I’ve got a tonne of eggplant, can you do something with it?” she said.
“We created ratatouille out of that so that whole product wouldn’t exist if that farmer hadn’t come to us with waste product.”
Kelly’s ten dehydrating machines have successfully turned everything from zucchini and pumpkin to tomatoes and cabbage into meal ingredients.
But the one fruit that has never made it beyond the test kitchen is the avocado, despite her best efforts to turn it into something edible including powdered guacamole.
“In the process of drying it and grinding it, it turns into a disgusting oily paste that was horrible,” she said.
“That’s the biggest failure we’ve had.”
Growth during hard times
COVID threatened to end the business when farmers markets shut down, but instead, it led to its growth after Kelly approached wholesalers with her product.
And as the business has grown Kelly has had to source fruit and vegetables from further afield, like Adelaide Hills strawberry farm Green Valley Strawberries.
“We are at the mercy of the weather and sometimes we can’t help that we have damaged fruit … they’re quite a soft-skinned fruit,” said farm manager Steph Rozaklis.
“So it’s great to have people like Kelly who don’t need the perfect A-grade strawberries for their business.”
Scaling the business
Until last year Kelly ran the business out of her home, with the trays of produce taking over most surfaces.
But a health crisis changed that.
“I got diagnosed with thyroid cancer and I just knew that I couldn’t recover if I had to have everything inside the house with me,” she said.
“I would have kept working, I would have kept pushing, I would have kept doing and I needed to stop.”
Fortunately, she crossed paths with a local pomegranate juice producer who offered to share their factory.
In return, Kelly has started value-adding the juice by-products.
While the business now sells about 80 different lines and employs several staff, she says this year has been the hardest to make a profit with higher costs of living changing buyer habits.
But the determined businesswoman isn’t too worried.
“I embrace at times the challenges that come our way because they force you to stop, re-evaluate, think and pivot … you know change it up,” she said.
Her latest change is to return to her scouting roots and launch a range of smaller hiking meals.
And while she didn’t have much ambition at the start of this business, it’s kicked in now.
“I want it to be thought of as a front-runner in terms of sustainability, in terms of making our world a little bit better.”
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