Episode 16: Woodlane Orchard shows farmers how waste produce can be worthwhile – and profitable

In this episode Kelly Johnson, founder of Woodlane Orchard & Sphiker, chats to Amie and Angeline about how she is helping farmers convert produce that might otherwise have gone to waste into valuable income – and at the same time creating shelf-stable meals for consumers at a price point that resets value perceptions.

Transcript

Amie:

Welcome to Women Transforming Food, a monthly podcast brought to you by G100 and Inside FMCG, exploring the stories of inspiring women shaping the food industry. Today, I'm joined by my co-host, G100 Mission Million, Angeline Acharya, Asia Pacific Chair of the Food Systems Innovation and Resilience Wing, and Kelly Johnson, CEO and founder at Woodlane Orchard.

So Kelly, you have mentioned that farmers have always done circular economy and it's insulting to imagine that it's a new concept. Yet you're helping farmers shift from accepting crop losses to valuing every piece of produce. How do you navigate this paradox and what specific conversations have been most effective in challenging that traditional farming mindset about second grade produce?

Kelly:

You're absolutely right, Amie. Farmers have always done circular economy well before it became a buzzword. They were doing it. They're the original recyclers and repurposes, but over time, the industry around them has changed. They've standardised food and people have decided what's good food and what's not good food. It used to be you grew it, whatever it was, however it came off the tree, you ate it. You didn't even think about it.

But you know the big guys have come in and they've decided what's good to eat and what's not good to eat. And the farmers are the ones that lose out to that. So when I sit down with a farmer, I never preach about sustainability. That'd be really insulting. They've been doing that forever. I say, show me what's hurting, what's going to waste. Where can I fit into your business? And then I show them the maths. They can actually make money out of that produce.

And one of my favorite conversations is, you a farmer who had a paddock full of zucchini that was going to go to waste, it had some hail damage on it. And when I looked at it, I saw opportunity. And when he looked at it, he saw waste. And when I told him, you know, we can turn this into something edible that's going to make you profit, you know, he got excited, I got excited. And it was one of the first times I really realized that, you know, I could change the way that they were thinking about the waste they're being told they have on their properties.

Angeline:

I love that. I love how you're not preaching to the farmers. Kelly there. One of the things that really fascinated me when we had a quick chat was that your current business model delivers meals, particularly for the elderly at $6 compared to, I guess, Meals on W heels, which is at around the $23 price point. How did you challenge the established perspectives that affordable nutrition for vulnerable populations must be expensive. And what resistance did you face from traditional providers when introducing such a disruptive pricing model, which I'm all for by the way.

Kelly:

Well, it's a funny one because most people just tell me it's impossible to make a meal at that price. you know, I'm utilising what otherwise would be waste. That does not mean that I'm paying nothing for it or I'm paying, you know, I know a lot of businesses will donate food. That's not my philosophy. I want to put farmers, you know, money into farmers' hands and I will pay them a premium because when I dry that product, it's going to come out, you know, perfectly fine. It's not a problem. It's a premium product to me.

So, but when I dry it, you know, I can use the tiniest little bit of dried produce to make a really delicious, affordable meal. And, you know, that is where fresh fruit and vegetables, sometimes there's, you know, a lot of waste. There's a lot of time prepping it. I've already done the prep. I've peeled, you know, the, you know, God help me. Three tons of pumpkin hand peeled is not fun, but I've done it and I've saved the whole crop. You know, I had a farmer with an entire crop he couldn't get rid of.

We did that. And once we've prepared that, once we've dried it and we've put it aside and now it's nice and shelf stable, I can use tiny increments of that product to make very affordable food. And once I show people, you know, cause they just can't get it into their head. They're like, no, there's no way you can do it at that price. Once I show them they're on board, you know, it's simple maths.

Amie:

So when a farmer came to you with a ton of eggplant, you created ratatouille, a product that wouldn't exist without that waste. How do you help producers see opportunity where they only see disposal costs? And can you share another example where challenging a farmer's perspective led to an entirely new revenue stream?

Kelly:

Absolutely. You know what's funny is most farmers come to me embarrassed. I've got this horrible, awful stuff. Like you don't really want it, do you? I'm like, yes, I want it. I'll give you what you want for it. Oh no, no, take it. Have it for free. It's fine. It's like waste. I'm like, that's defeating the whole purpose. I want to pay you for the product. There's nothing wrong with it. And they are literally going, are very generous anyway, you and they're trying to say to me, just take it, just take it. It's fine.

So yeah, I do struggle to get the money into their hands, but once we start, they get very excited about it. And that being said, you know, ratatouille is a product that I made because I had a farmer turn up the driveway with massive excess, you eggplant. Never used eggplant before. What was I going to do with it? So I created ratatouille and the farmer got very excited. He couldn't wait. He had to eat it. He had to try it. He was, he couldn't believe that I was able to do that from a dried product.

And then there's another farmer where they had an entire crop of quinces. Unfortunately, I found out too late, but their entire crop of quince had to drop and rot because they were offered just 36 cents a kilogram for the quince. Their break even was 70 cents and it's just tragic. So they just let the whole crop rot. as I said to them, I could have taken that quince. I could have dried that quince.

And that quince could have sat on the shelf all year until they got around to making paste or whatever other byproduct they wanted to make from their quinces. So it just broke my heart. And that's the whole message I'm trying to get out to farmers, know, that don't consider your second's produce as waste. Look at it from the perspective of, you know, what could it become? How exciting can I, you what exciting product can I create from this excess produce?

Angeline:

I love that, finding that value across when someone is someone else's waste, right? At the end of the day. And that's what we need to avoid. So Kelly, you mentioned times you've struggled with communicating, you know, the sustainability message without really overshadowing the product value that you seem to find like in that Ratatouille example. How have you challenged your own perspective on storytelling to ensure customers see the commercial value and not just the social good, which there is a lot of social good in this too.

Kelly:

Yeah. See the social good bit is the bit that sets my heart on fire. I love that stuff. That's what makes me want to do what I'm doing. You know I want to save produce. I want to support farmers, but ultimately that's not the customer's journey. They want good food. They want it to taste good. They want it to look good. And so I've had to learn some hard lessons over the last couple of years where I'm banging on about, know, you should be thinking sustainability and my product's the most sustainable product on the market and you should buy it because of that.

And the customers are going, well, yeah, that's okay. But we want to know that it tastes good. That's fit for purpose. The sustainability angle I've learned is the cherry on top. I have to market the product to eat the product. The sustainability is that added bonus that they get when they buy our product.

Amie:

And so you've spoken about how you are communicating this to farmers and that lens for the consumer. I'm keen to understand how you educate the broader food industry to see these opportunities?

Kelly:

Yeah. Well, I have to get them curious, don't I? know, curiosity is the biggest plug that I have. You know, when I look at produce, I don't see just the edible portion that the industry's used to. I see the whole product. Like, you know, it could be pomegranate, you know, there's the pomegranate and everyone thinks about the pomegranate juice and the pomegranate seeds. But the husk has a lot of nutrition in it.

So I'm looking at it and going, okay, well, that's good. That bit's taken care of. That's great. Let's take the seeds away. Now we're left with this. Now what can we do? And that's the stuff that I get very excited about. How can I value add to the parts that we've traditionally thrown away? So instead of looking at the produce as we have edible parts and we have waste, I look at the product as a whole and how can we use all of it? And then the approach is really simple, you know, we test it, we dehydrate it and grind it and taste it.

And then we value add to it. We've got to look at, you know, what's nutrition, what color is it, how pretty is it, is it palatable to the customer? And then we design the product around that. So, you know, might be that pomegranate fluff, which is the froth that comes out when they make pomegranate juice from the seeds that, you know, they just throw it straight down the drain. It's just froth. Well, we put that into fruit bark and made peach and pomegranate fruit bark and it's delicious.

And it had always been treated like waste. So that's just how I look at it.

Angeline:

And so, I guess for long we've, you can just go and buy surplus produce, right? And you've really deliberately focused on educating farmers to find that value themselves, like sort of the questions that you've asked. And so what have you found with farmers? know, are they comfortable with just the traditional models that they continue to sort of focus on?

And how are you demonstrating the shift or that long-term benefit for farmers to start to find the value in these spaces?

Kelly:

Like this is one of my biggest passions, you know, getting the farmers to change the way they think, the way they've always thought. And that's not all farmers, of course. It's a lot of the older farmers who've done things, you know, in my region, we have farmers that have been entrenched. have a generational apricot farmers or citrus farmers. They've always done it this way. That's how they do it. And they've always given away the excess. And I come in and I'm disrupting the way they think about that.

Also, sometimes it's just fear. They're afraid of trying something new because they've always done it and it worked. But what we found is in the case of some of these older generational farmers now, the practices that the big buyers are doing have changed. We had a local farmer who'd been selling his orange crop to Geelong, manufacturers in Geelong, for over 30 years. Well, they changed what they want to do and they just ditched his contract.

And he went from last year selling his oranges to having absolutely nowhere to sell them anymore. And so suddenly he's faced with what am I going to do? I've got, you know, a massive amount of oranges to get rid of and nobody to buy them. So although I can only do a little bit of those crops, like literally can't do, you know, 200 tonnes of oranges in a go. It does make him readjust the way he's thinking about his oranges. He's always turned them into juice.

What else can he do with them instead? And that's the kind of thing that's on a big scale, but that's the same as apricots or zucchinis or pumpkins or anything else where the farmer has always just done this. I come in, I'm disrupting the way they think about it and trying to get them through that fear factor to having a look at new alternatives. What else can they do with their produce?

Angeline:

I think you're going one more step and not just disrupting, but you're actually showing them how to do it and helping them do it. Right. Because I think that's always a conversion point that is missing.

Kelly:

That is really true. And I think too, when you start saying to somebody, let's give you a very small example. A farmer who had a crop of apples, the apples were going to go to waste. Yeah, there was only a thousand kilos. It wasn't that massive, but to them it was a thousand kilos that they didn't want to waste. So we took them, and we dried them. We gave them half of the dried value back. Now they would be, maybe they get a dollar a kilo for their apples. So they've got a thousand dollars.

Now we dried them and by the time we dry them, they dry down to 10%. So the thousand kilos is now a hundred kilos. We gave them back their 50 kilos. They sold their 50 kilos at $50 a kilo. So they've now made two and a half thousand dollars instead of the original thousand dollars for the apples. And when you can start to talk to them like that, the lights come on. They go, are you serious? Like I can make, and I didn't even have to produce it. You produced it for me. That's the kind of thing that we're starting to talk about now and having a bit of fun with.

Amie:

That’s exciting. The eyes would be lighting up at that point.

Kelly:

Yeah.

Absolutely. And so to mine, I get really excited. I remember being a farmer's daughter. I remember not having any money. I remember the difference between $1,000 and $2,500. That's huge. That's school shoes and that's paying school fees and doing things like that. And even though I'm doing little bits for lots of different farmers, that's a real impact. That's paying school fees. That's getting kids off on school camps. That's doing the things that they need to do in their home.

Amie: 

That's awesome. So as someone who speaks nationally about circular economy, well, circular economy thinking and women led innovation, how do you challenge, I suppose, food industry leaders to move beyond pilot programs to systematic change? And what perspectives must shift for Australia's food system to really embrace that circularity at scale?

Kelly:

Yeah, look, pilot, people do pilot programs because they're safe. It's like dipping your toe in the water and going, yeah, that's all right. But it often doesn't move very fast from there. You know, it takes time to do pilots. You know, circularity only works when it becomes part of your business model, not part of the marketing. You know, it's got to be the whole picture from the ground up.

So we need to shift from, let's try this little sustainability project into let's redesign how we value our resources. That's really, really important. So I challenged leaders by saying, you know, what can we do with your waste? Why do you have waste at all? Like in the case of the pomegranates, you know, why have any waste at all? Let's find a way to use it. There's too many people in the world going hungry to be throwing away real food.

Angeline:

Oh, I love those perception changes, I think, and making sustainability at the core of your business model at the end of the day, right? Not a nice to have, as you've said. And so Kelly, you've said that you want to be a role model. You already are a role model in my mind, a cheerleader and a supporter of the Network for Women who Dare to Dream Big. And when women thrive in agriculture, entire communities benefit. I think you've been quoted as saying that.

What would you say to our listeners out there who see waste and efficiency in the corner of the food industry that they might be working in, and being told maybe that's how things are done? What's your first thing that you want to share with them in terms of one challenge, how they could transform that observation into action?

Kelly:

That's a good question. I think, you know, I quote the UN sustainability goals a lot. I think it's irresponsible for anyone to own a business of any kind in today's society and not be thinking along those lines. 

It's really important when you see waste in a business or in a farm or on a property or in your region, think outside the box. Like I said, look at that produce as a whole piece. What can we do with every part of that product? You know, get inventive and get brave. You know, there are businesses everywhere that will take that produce. Businesses like mine, but there are juices, there are, you know, pear companies, there are all sorts of different places that will take surplus produce and they will buy it from you. There are small fruit and veg shops, you know, here in our region, a beautiful place, Farm Fresh. They take a fruit from all around the region and they take the seconds and they put it into the store and they move it for the farmers. You know, the fact that I've been taking that fruit for a while has actually scared some of the businesses into using produce, you know.

Once somebody starts to use it, they go, hang on, we better get on board that because you know, we're to look wasteful now. So, you know, once a region starts doing the right things, everybody comes on board. Everyone starts trying to move that produce. Just be brave. Maybe it's a business concept that you can try just like I did. Maybe you'll start on your kitchen bench just like I did, but maybe you'll end up with a business that goes national just like I did.

Amie:

Thank you, Kelly and Angeline, and a big thank you for listening to this episode of Women Transforming Food. If you've enjoyed this episode, feel free to like and subscribe wherever you tune into your podcasts.