Food Connect Shed’s desperate bid to raise $2 million

It’s crunch time for a Brisbane couple hoping to hit their funding goal by 9pm on Wednesday to grow their innovative food distribution hub.

Robert Pekin and Emma-Kate Rose, co founders of Food Connect Hub in Brisbane.

It’s crunch time for a Brisbane couple hoping to raise at least $2 million by 9pm on Wednesday to grow their innovative food distribution hub.

About 450 small investors have already pledged $1.2 million to help Robert Pekin and his partner, Emma-Kate Rose, buy and improve the Salisbury warehouse property that has been home to their Food Connect Shed for the past 12 years.

But the crowd-funding effort, launched 90 days ago with a goal of generating up to $4 million, cannot be extended because of strict laws governing such equity raising campaigns.

Despite the obvious hurdle, Rose sounded optimistic yesterday that the funding target could be reached in time.

She told City Beat that talks were still under way with a handful of sophisticated investors to get them over the line.

Such high net-worth punters are able to tip in more than the $10,000 cap which applies to mum and dad investors.

Food Connect Shed is Australia’s first community-owned food hub.

The cap, which doesn’t apply in several other countries, “has restricted our ability to raise money,’’ Rose said.

So far only three of the 450 investors, most of whom were customers, farmers and locals, have passed the “sophisticated” threshold that required them to be worth more than $2.5 million, she said.

Even if the couple falls short of their goal, the business will carry on and there will be no impact on the 12 tenants who now operate from the warehouse, Rose vowed.

Indeed, another dozen business owners, including OzHarvest and a craft brewer, are poised to take up space in the historic 2836 sqm building that once served as a World War II munitions breakdown factory.

Plans for the Food Connect Shed in Salisbury.

Up to 30 more could move in over the next three years.

If needed, Rose said the couple already has a Plan B, which would see them work with “ethical banks’’– a phrase which struck your diarist as perhaps the ultimate oxymoron.

In addition to buying the site for $1.8 million, they would like quite a bit more dough to retrofit the building to provide commercial food processing facilities, retail shopfronts, co-working areas, conference facilities and event space for hire.

Regardless of how things plays out, it’s already been an amazing turnaround journey for Pekin.

He lost his family’s fourth-generation dairy farm in Victoria 20 years ago. When he arrived in Brisbane in 2003, he was broke and homeless.

LNP TURMOIL

One of the key money spinners inside the LNP’s Brisbane bunker has quit after a short and not-so-sweet tour of duty.

Leonie Johnston has only served as the manager of fundraising and “stakeholder policy engagement’’ for less than a year but she walks out the door for good this Friday.

When City Beat rang for a chat yesterday, Johnston said she was leaving to pursue “other opportunities’’ and her departure had nothing to do with the LNP.

Johnston didn’t elaborate but we’re guessing she’ll be throwing herself back in to her job at HOST Event Management, where she has served as managing director for the past four years.

When asked directly if she was leaving because of an allegedly toxic environment, she declined to respond.

“No comment on that one,’’ she said.

City Beat spies tell us that Johnston found the vibe so fraught she spent a good deal of her time “in meetings’’ or “working from home’’.

HOT AND HEAVY

Eyebrows have been shooting skywards inside a leading Brisbane engineering firm for the past eight months.

It seems complaints have been lodged with an internal whistleblower’s hotline to no avail about a top manager and one his underlings in a rather obvious fling despite each being married to others.

We hear she’s already been fast-tracked for promotion, triggering anger among colleagues.