Queen Jilly

Jilly’s revolutionary idea for a meal business - Weeknight Cook - was saved by her 11 year old son and his mates. After winning awards the business almost fell apart again, but she soldiered on with inspiration from her kids. 

Brought to you by The Queensland Writers Centre and supported by the Queensland Government through Arts Queensland.

Produced by F&K Media.

Transcript

Telling Our Stories to the World is a series from Queensland Writer Centre. We acknowledge the traditional owners of the land on which this podcast was made. 

Welcome to Queens of the Land, the podcast about women carving out their best life on the land. I'm Jane Hultgren. And I'm Helen Roche. Helen, have you ever had an amazing idea for a business and thought, if I could be bothered, this could make big bucks? Well, funny you should say that because about 15 years ago, my husband and I got this brilliant idea to import wine from Chile.

I think I remember you telling me about this. Yes. And this is when you started your, um, breaking bad wine business from your garage. Yes. Yes, yes, yes. Southern Cross Wine Merchants, we were called. Now the big bucks bit. Yeah. How'd that go? Didn't actually pay off. Damn. But we had a really fun time. Oh, that's so good.

How many years did you do it for? We did it for eight years and then we needed to get a real job because our children needed to go to school. Oh, damn. They kids, they get in the way all the time, don't they? Uh, well, today we're meeting Jilly Tyler, who had this big idea about making dinner easy, delicious, and saving on food waste.

It's called Weeknight Cook. How do we take the, the bits of meat protein that aren't easily Yeah. Made into dishes by consumers. So the longer to cook cuts and develop them into really yummy meal solutions. So that's sort of a win-win for the consumer, but also showcasing Australian produce and agriculture.

So is that a thing like the Lite N Easy or the, yeah. Imagine if, uh, Lite N Easy and HelloFresh had a baby. That's what Weeknight Cook would be. So it's, it doesn't come like ready meal done. Mm-hmm. Like, and there's just a few minimal other steps in there. Oh, wow. And all really good quality produce. So that's their point of difference is Julie from The Darling Downs.

Yes. She's, she wears these beautiful, like bright. Colours all the time. She's got bright, bold glasses, so she's just this, this kind of flash of colour in Dalby, you see passing in the distance sometimes where I see her. I actually thought when I did my interview with her, I thought that I had the audio sus, but I remember hearing the jingle bells of the bangles thinking, oh, I should say get the bangles off, but I couldn't because  they like, seemed like they were a part of her.  I grew up in Dalby and I had a few ambitions, and one was never to come back to live here. So yeah, I was a real city dweller and then I was living in London and came home for holidays and literally met and fell in love with the boy next door and had to ring my friends and say, can you get all my stuff outta storage and stick it on a a ship bound for Australia. Wow. That must really be love because it, I imagine that was a bit of a culture shock coming back to Australia and Dalby. Ihad to get rid of all my high heels. That was the biggest thing. Like, you know, I used to wear high heels to work every day and they don't kind of work in Dalby, but that's good.

I'm too old to wear them now anyway. So she moved back to Dalby and many years later she's talking to her dad. 'cause her family at the time owned a feedlot and we were two going into three generations. We were exporting a bit to Japan. And I said, I think we should market our own beef. And Dad said, plenty of my mates are gone broke doing that.

Rah. I went on, here we go. And he said, when you can use the whole carcass and find value for the whole carcass, you and I can talk. So I went off and I knew nothing other than the fact that red meat is red. So it was pretty steep learning curve. That's entrepreneurial just there isn't it? I reckon and, and just the dad being like, you know, rah rah, rah.

And she thought, oh, well game on now. Sort of thing. Like, is this just the way dads play us? Where they're like, I think that's really good idea. How do I get her to do it? I can't say it's a good idea. And then she won't do it. Yeah, you can't do that love. And then there you go. Yeah, that's, well good some good parenting advice.

That is a good parenting tip. So I did lots of courses. A lot of people said they didn't like dealing with beef 'cause it was expensive and the risk of it not turning out the way they wanted was pretty high.  So then I, I interviewed a lot of people around ready  eals and a lot of people didn't trust them.

So a lot of people said, we dunno what's in them lots just said the crap. And my sister was the one, a lot of them described it, but they didn't actually pinpoint it. But it was that if I stick a lasagna or a ready meal in the oven and put it on the table, I don't feel like I've cooked dinner for my family.

So even though it's justifiable, 'cause I didn't get home from soccer training till 7:30. And my, my sister said it's mother guilt. That's why we don't, because A, it's, it's crap. But B, it's mother guilt. Wow. I must be a terrible mother because there's no guilt in putting a lasagna on the table. I don't think a ready, ready made one.

Have you ever tasted some of those lasagnas, though? They're awful. They, they have to agree. Yeah. They taste like guilt. So Jilly wanted to create something between a ready meal and making something from scratch. By then, her family sold the feedlot, but she was in too deep. She was invested. I always wanted to be the chicken nugget of the beef industry.

You know, like everyone, everyone tells you that they'd never give their children chicken nuggets. And I used to stalk people in the shopping center and all these women you'd sit at, you know, dinner parties with that ‘oh no, my children’ and I used to say to Kelvin, they do their, trolley was full of nuggets and come and used to go, Jilly, you cannot do that in Australia.

You can't do that in Dalby. You cannot stalk people. People were giving their kids chicken nuggets 'cause they, they served a purpose. You know, they, they filled a pain point. Yep. I have served my children many a chicken nugget in the day, because at the time, that's what they ate. But if there was a  nutritious beef nugget, they probably would've eaten it.

Hello, my name is Jane and I serve my children many are chicken nuggets and I'm just now understanding why I always seem to run into JIlly at the shops when she's right behind me, Uh, checking out the four kilo back of Dino Nuggets. The other pain points she was focused on were the beef producers.

What parts of the carcass were they struggling to sell so that they could save all that waste? 'cause I was focusing on what we call the non primal cuts. And one of the reasons that people don't eat them is because they take a lot longer to cook or otherwise they're as tough as anything. So then it was like, well, how do I make them tender?

Well, sous vide was the obvious solution to that. I. Helen, have you ever heard of sous vide?  I have actually. Okay, so what do you think it is? Take a guess. I think, isn't it, where you immerse the meat in water in a water package and cook it at a very low temperature for a very long time. Pretty much. Wow. Look at you go,  you’re a wealth of knowledge. I had no idea what sous vide was before I talked to Jilly. So, sous vide is becoming more trendy. I think Master Chef kind of helped that, but it's not overly practical to do at home. It's a French principle. Food is cooked under low temperatures, but high enough to pasteurise it, but low temperatures for longer time.

So basically that gives you the intensity flavor. It tenderises it also because it's pasteurised. It does have a really safe, long shelf life. So, and that means we're not having to add chemicals or other additives to it to be able to give it that long shelf life. That will make, like she said, really, really tender meat.

So if you've cooked a piece of meat for four hours at a low temperature and then you just sear it, oh, that will be melt in your mouth, yum. Yeah, and then I won't have any guilt 'cause it'll, you know, I'm still cooking it. Exactly. Yeah, that's right. And could be in your fridge for a while. What, like a genius idea?

Mm. Hey, to utilise that for families. Look at the French, look at the French go.  Look at Jilly in the French. But now she was like, what am I making? So I was doing a lot of r and d in my home kitchen and I, I rang a friend who was a chef, said, what do I do with all this off cuts, David? Like, this is a waste.

I'm throwing them out. And he said, you need to make a meatball. Meatballs high end. Meatballs. There's your chicken nugget. Yeah. In the meat. Exactly. It's perfect. Yeah. So Jilly gets very excited by the meatball idea, okay. And she's off and she's got a retailer on board and everything is going gangbusters, but then she runs into a little problem.

All of our products are sous vide, which means. Everything has to be vacuum packed. So if you vacuum pack a raw meatball, you end up with just a big patty. It's a disaster. So to put that through the factory, we basically had to design a way that we could protect the meatball shape while we sucked all the air out of the bag.

But basically, most moulds for manufacturing, particularly food, are a metal thing. So you have to go through metal manufacturers and apparently there's not enough of those. So I went to so many places and they went oh yeah, we'll get that done as soon as possible. And I said, oh, you know, good, good. You know, what's the timeframe?

And they'd say, six months. And I'd go, no, no, no, no, no. We are about to hit the shelves in like six weeks. And I was at home one night going to my husband. I said, what are we gonna do? And my son, who was at the time in grade six has come out and he was doing what they call the STEM program. And he said, oh mom, don't worry about that.

I'll make it. Me and my mates, we'll do it through, you know, STEM. I said, what? He goes, we'll, just 3D, print it. He said, don't worry about all that metal stuff. And I'm going, oh, it first only was that simple. My goodness. How clever is that child? I know. 3D printing. Yeah. And I love his, uh oh Mum. Don't worry about that.

Like grade six 11, we got, I got you, Mum. I got you. But it turns out. It is actually that simple. Her son was onto something quite revolutionary. And so within a week, not only did we have it designed, we had found a place in Toowoomba, West of the Range, who this funny little man who printed them, and that would be, oh, nearly two years ago now.

And they're still going strong. So we were saved by a heap of 12 year olds.  And they were pretty proud. Like, you know, there's plenty of photos circulating with them in their blazers, you know, holding that mould as if they should be getting a Nobel Peace Prize, and they probably deserved it. I felt like giving them one if I could have,  I think the world is safe with the next generation coming through.

I know it is. So.  Cool. It changed her business. Yes. If she hadn't actually been able to do that, she wouldn't have been able to get those things on the absolutely on the shelf in six weeks. So yeah. Also, the success of this meatball mold have led to all of these other food innovations. My manufacturer, who I work with, Roger, his passion and most of his work is around age care, and traditionally people who have difficulty with swallowing.

They stick it in a blender at the hospital and out comes your food altogether. And Roger, as Roger goes, he said, you know what? You don't want to eat your food. All mushed, all the flavors mushed together. He said, you wanna have a bit of broccoli and a bit of this and a bit of that, and you want it to look like food.

So his work is around delivering food to the aged care facilities. And yes, it's puree broccoli, but it has to look and taste like broccoli. So the challenge he was having was the same challenge we were having with the meatballs. He had to kind of develop moulds, and the one particular mould he'd had a lot of trouble with was broccoli.

He, he could just never get it right. And I very boldly said, well, look what the kids have done with the meatballs. Cool. So we again, engaged the kids. And now Roger, we've, we don't sort of, you know, use child labour anymore. We've, we've sort of ventured out of that. But now all of Roger's moulds. Are designed and manufactured in Dalby by a local.

Which has been a project that he's been working on for years and never been able to do. Oh, that's just incredible. That's, I know. How cool is that again, that, that trusting, I don't know everything. And as an adult it's very hard sometimes to, you know, sit and listen to a child tell you something, but yeah, good on them.

So they solve the meatball problem and get a little bit too excited. Don't know how this happened. We ended up turning everything into a meatball and I was sitting in Sydney at a very major retailer and this category manager who was a bit sassy and she goes, I just don't understand why you've turned everything into a meatball.

And I swear I felt like I'd been hit by bus. 'cause it just dawned on me. I looked, I went, turned to my colleague, I went we’ve turned everything into a meatball. 

I just can picture that like, oh, oh my, we've turned everything into a meatball, and I know that exact feeling when you've gotten onto a winner and you take it way too far. So after many twists and turns, like they almost launch during Covid and then pulled back because everyone in the food industry was going broke.

They finally are at this stage of launching. Some amazing opportunities, but some of the hurdles. I never saw coming, never ever saw coming. So Julie and the business Weeknight Cook was nominated for some business awards in Dalby. So excited, right? But Jilly felt sick because the business wasn't going well.

I just was like I'm not going, I'm not going like we are in dire straits. We are in a really bad situation right now. And eventually I agreed to go and I was being a bit of a itch about it. And then when I, I, I won three really major rewards. Well, Weeknight Cook, no, I didn't, and I got a phone call at nine o'clock on the Monday morning.

Got the awards on the Saturday. And it was dire, like it was the biggest kick we could have got. Everyone's ringing me going, oh wow. You know, and I'm just going, you have no idea  what? What's actually going on? I’m a fraud. It must have been a terrible feeling. Yeah. I can't imagine how sick you would feel.

Yeah, absolutely. So what happened? Just about the worst thing you could imagine hearing from a retailer who is selling your product? We got delisted from a major retailer. Yeah. All of our products were withdrawn from the shelf. It just wasn't working. Look, there'd been lots of challenges. The, the very senior manager that I had done all my communication pretty much with, he quit the week before we were meant to launch. 

And with that, they said, okay. You are only gonna launch in Queensland. I went into the stores to see us on shelf and I looked around and I rang from the car park in tears. My colleagues and I went, none of our people are here.  There was not one customer that fitted our target demographic. We have a major problem here. 

Oh wow. Helen, how would you feel to hear this news? You've just won a bunch of awards for your business and your products are being pulled from shelves, and this has been years in the making. Like what would you do? That would be devastating? Because it's personal. Like she's laid herself on the line for this product and this business.

That would be just devastating. Yeah, exactly. I said, you know what, this isn't what I set out to do. And I spent a couple of months and my wall is always covered in butcher's paper and post-it notes and, and I went back to our why, which sounds really corny, but I just went, why did I set out to do this?

And a lot of why would I bother keep doing this? And that was mostly driven by my kids. You know, like as a parent, we were always saying to our kids, you pick yourself up and you build your army around you. And I had no reason not to pick myself up 'cause I had an amazing army around me. I love that Jilly, in that moment, in her sort of dark night of the soul sort of moment where she could have quite rightly just gone, bugger this, I'm out, gave it a good red hot, go onto my next thing.

She knew she had her children looking at her and she wanted to actually walk her talk. Being something happens, you pick yourself up, you get an army around you and you charge on and yeah. I love that.  So she went back to basics. And now we are about to launch products that we've wanted to probably do to start with.

So, you know, the good old favourites. So we've got a lamb shank, a beef bourguignon, which I can never say properly. A really good quality pork, meaty pork rib, a chicken - stuff that we all love to eat.  But we just don't have time to eat, which was what we set out to do, not just create meatballs. So Jilly pivoted.

She's focusing on what she's set out to do in the first place, really focusing on on Western Queensland where they don't have access to stuff. And one of my other things, my big why was this was always about showcasing Australian producers and showcasing Australian produce.  But we weren't doing any of that really.

We weren't even talking to producers anymore. So at the moment, I'm having some really amazing, and you get off the phone, you actually go, this is why I do what I do. You know? We don't have to be the paddock and the plate, but if we work together, wow, what could we create?  Helen, what do you think you've taken away from Jilly's journey?

One of the really important things that I've just thought about then was that. If she had succeeded with the meatballs in the first place, she wouldn't actually be where she really passionately wants to be now. So I think as hard as it would've been for her, and it's easy for me to say, to have.  Being removed from the stores and you know, being embarrassed about the awards, et cetera.

It's actually put her in the place where she's supposed to be. Yeah, absolutely. Do you ever watch Bob Ross? No. On tv. This old, he's dead now, but a painter, when he makes an mistake on his painting, he's like, oh, that's a happy accident. And in our family, we always say if something goes wrong, we're like, oh, it's a happy accident.

Yeah, you, it, it can be, you can turn those things around and this is what Jilly tells her boys, sometimes the best experience is the worst experience you can have. Sometimes you learn more and you gain more out of the things that you actually don't even know how you're gonna pick yourself up from, particularly on those days when they get in the car and, you know,  they, they burst into tears or want the world to gobble them up.

And the second thing is, you know, there's good role models and there's bad role models, but we can actually learn more from the bad role models 'cause the people you deal with and you go, you're a bit of a dick and I really don't like working with you and reflecting on what's the silver lining of that isn't always easy, but, but I think those experiences keep me a bit grounded so I can have those conversations with my kids and their mates and other, other people. Like I think sometimes we only tell people the things that are going really well in our business. And that's what, you know, back to that when I got all those awards, like everyone's going, oh, look at Jilly, lucky Jilly. Oh, isn’t Jilly just soaring. And people would stop me in the street and go, oh my goodness.

Well, I, I'd have to walk away in tears just going you have no idea. You have no idea. That's what, why you go, yeah, actually I need to keep doing it. 'cause I can't look at my kids, honestly in the face and go, you know what? Pick yourself up. You know, you can't do that if you're not prepared to do that yourself.

You know, even yesterday something had happened and they said, I guess it's a bit like when that happened to you, whatever they brought up was like really bad and humiliating. Like, and I went, yes,  yes. At the time I thought I really didn't need that brought up today. But yes, you're right. Yes, you're right. 

So that's why I do what I do. Uh, but it's not always easy. Oh my God. That is, uh, good old kids. Hey, good old kids. They'll,  they'll make it real, won't they? It reminds me of, and it's about a year or so ago, I took the kids to this trampoline park and my son Eli, he's a little acrobat, so he was doing that thing where he jumps off the trampoline and then fully flips and into the pit sort of thing.

And he just did it with ease. And Lucy, who's a couple of years older, was trying really hard to do the same thing and she'd gone a couple of times. She's just always chickened out. Uh, and I got this girl who was like, you know like Simone Biles, but at the coast to teach Lucy how to do it. And I watched along and I was like, Lucy, I'll have a go and I will fail so badly that then you'll, she'll be like, okay, Mum, go.

Anyway. So I jumped and jumped and I was like, and I, I flipped. I flipped over. I actually did it, and I was like. Got up from thinking. I went, I  did it. I did it. And I turned around and my pants were split. And Lucy and Eli and Simone Biles, they were all like, your pants. I was like, I don't even care. I did it! Anyway, Lucy then did it afterwards. And of course it's not the story about how mom flipped, it's the story about when Mum split her pants. Yeah. But that's okay. That's okay.  And on that night, yeah.  Next week on Queens of the Land, we're adopting a farmer and resting back control from the big supermarkets. In my opinion, small-scale growing is the future of food in Australia.

You are listening to Queens of the Land, a season of the Telling Our Stories to the World podcast, brought to you by the Queensland Writers Center and supported by the Queensland Government through Arts Queensland produced by F&K Media.  Stick around to hear what we've got planned for next season of telling our stories to the world.

Stick around to hear what we've got planned for next season of telling our stories to the world.  Hi, Lori-Jay, welcome to the podcast. Thanks, Helen. Thanks for having me. You are the CEO for the Queensland Writers Center.

Can you tell us what's in the works for next season of telling our stories to the world? Well, it's fingers crossed at the moment. We are desperately looking for that kind of funding for it, but we are very excited by this one. It's Mornington Island. We are looking up in the Torres Strait. We are looking at Indigenous and First Nations writers, capturing their stories, how they wanna capture them.

Really excited. This is, uh, a long way away. So we've gotta get our bums up there, get our writers up there, put the tools up in place for those people to be able to capture their stories and then to disseminate them and share it with people. Wow, that sounds so exciting and hot. Exciting. And hot and hot.

Yes. I'm very excited to be part of that.  Now, what's the idea behind Telling Our Stories to the World and how long have you been doing it for? So this cycle is number three. Mornington will be number four. We started off with Telling Our Stories to the World as social prescription with Department of Health in Queensland.

So we went out into Longreach and Barcaldine and we were looking for people who were struggling with mental health and using the small act of writing to be able to get them talking about their stories. We quickly understood that there's gonna be people who can write a postcard for us or tell us a story.

And then we found a couple of people who are writers and that was very exciting. We've got a couple of people now, or published authors from that first wave, and that's from finding them, giving them the tools, like I said, and then they're just off and running with their own stories. Uh, so with the postcards, I did this first session myself, and we took a book about the lost crayons, and when the crayons got lost, they sent a postcard back home.

So I had all the little kids. And in these towns you've got children from like four years old up to 14, 15 in the same classroom. So you need something that everyone's gonna be able to do. So we had them just write one or two sentences about, I love living in Longreach because, and this is what I do with my family.

Then we told them we were gonna share this postcards we're gonna post them, uh, around the world. And the first year we went to Germany and Japan and we sent them to classrooms over there and they wrote stories back as well that we then sent back to those schools. So it really was like a postcard exchange, uh, between two different very different groups of children across the world. This allows us to talk to the children and the children. Go, mum, I really liked this. Take me to the library this afternoon where those trainers are gonna be. Then we get to speak to the parents. So it's really a double kind of you know, it's a folded environment where we start off here with the aim of like, let's speak to the parents about what their worlds are like out here, and do they have any in this particular instant mental health issues that we needed to tackle.

Second Wave was working with climate deniers, so the Department of Science and Environment. Really exciting. You're talking to kids in schools. Trying to beat their parents so that we can have that really deep conversation about what does it look like when we tackle climate, when we have to endure it, when we are living with it, it's not going anywhere.

So what are those changes? Using the kids to get their mums and dads down to the libraries. And again, the small acts of writing. And we found some great stories that we shared through anthologies and things like that.  And then last yeah? Well last year was Helen's year.  We met with camels. We met with women on their farms, women in rural and regional Queensland, in that southeast region.

And I think what's really important here was these stories need to be told in their voices, we haven't homogenised these stories. They are very clearly coming from the land of those, um, people and sharing it with, uh, the rest of the state, the rest of the country. And now on our podcast.  We're very excited.

What a wonderful project, Lori-Jay, and I think everyone should get on board with it. Now, if people do have an idea for any seasons, would you like to hear from them? We would love to. In particular, if you know something about your region that the rest of us think we know. But we probably have the wrong end of the stick.

'cause you know, we are from the city or we're from, you know, the coast or something like that. We really wanna find, did you know that this is what happens out here? One of the things that was very exciting with the first telling our stories to the world was we asked kids, what's it like to live in Barcaldine?

And they'd be like, I go pigging with dad and we have meat and three veg. And we, we were like, from the city, we were like, oh really? And is that the same when we send those postcards to the children in Japan? And the kids were like, yes. I'm like, do you think they've got guns?  Oh, wouldn't they? Do you think they go pigging?

Do you think? And it was very much this broadening of their world as well as they come in. And that's something we wanna keep their stories, but share them with, uh, the rest of the world. And then vice versa. So I think that's one of the most powerful things that this project does is share those stories.

Thanks so much for that, Lori-Jay It's a really exciting project and I'm very, um, interested in seeing where it goes to next. Well, if anyone calls from Hamilton Island, we are free to also help with those stories. Definitely.