Silver Tongue Foods grows from Covid pastime to fast moving national business
A Maroochydore couple have revealed how they turned sourdough cracker baking from a Covid hobby to a rapidly growing business with aims to have 350 stockists by the end of 2022.
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What started as a Covid hobby has turned into a fast moving business for a Maroochydore couple who are ramping up their sourdough cracker baking to target more interstate stockists.
The idea for Silver Tongue Foods was sparked by Kristina Kucan who began cooking her family’s Croatian sourdough recipes during the early 2020 lockdowns which stifled her recycling business.
Her handmade crackers proved to be a big hit among her partner Andrew Tolson’s colleagues and soon after a wider group of people outside their network which prompted them to start a business around her creations.
The duo have seen strong demand ever since and are now focused on ramping up production of their sourdough snacks in 2022 to lock in more retail stores across the country.
“It wasn’t a planned business, it wasn’t something I thought about doing during or after Covid,” Ms Kucan said.
“Each sale I made I bought more flour and other ingredients and prepared my homebaking to reach more customers and it just kept going from there.”
The couple are based at a commercial kitchen in Maroochydore fitted with an industrial oven and rolling machine where they produce a tonne of their naturally fermented sourdough crackers a month.
They began stocking their Croatian-inspired crackers on ecommerce company Artisans Bend (formerly Cheese Therapy) early on which boasts more than 50,000 active customers in Australia.
Silver Tongue Foods managed to attain 80 wholesale accounts by February 2021 and introduced a growing range of jams and pickles to accompany their gourmet snacks.
The business locked in Sydney-based distributor Cartel and Co late in 2021 to manage their accounts and have focused on breaking their products into the retail scenes in Victoria, New South Wales and the ACT.
The duo have about 220 stockists nationwide and aim to have 300 to 350 in total by the end of 2022.
Their business has seen a 150 per cent increase in annual revenue from the end of the last financial year and have projected their growth rise further for the next fiscal year.
“The priority isn’t earning large amounts of money for ourselves, we’re still investing and there’s more that we’d like to do but we made the decision the business needs to sustain itself and made the decision to put back into it and not take,” Mr Tolson said.
“The reality is it’s very difficult, we’ve sacrificed a lot for this and this is our focus, we’re committed to one day being Queensland’s largest sourdough cracker manufacturer and it’s going to take a lot of focus and putting back into the business to get there.”
While Silver Tongue Foods are concentrating on the Australian market the business is also looking to be export ready by December.
The couple are eyeing off the Japanese market which Mr Tolson said is seeing rising demand for clean foods and naturally fermented sourdough products.
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