Sunshine Coast business The Village Pickle turns pandemic into profit

The Covid crisis turned into an opportunity for these cafe owners who share a love of fermented products. Read their saucy success story.

Village Pickle Chili Co co-founder Brendan Chan with the many varieties of chili he uses to make fermented chili sauce. Picture: Supplied

When Covid-19 restrictions hit Nambour cafe The Village Pickle in 2020 they used the unexpected downtime to launch hot new products, literally.

Jaimi Crocker and Brendan Chan had always loved fermenting their own hot sauces at home, a condiment Ms Crocker said they add to “literally every meal”.

But they had only recently opened their Nambour cafe, The Village Pickle, when Covid-19 hit.

Rather than wallow, the pair used the closure time to develop a range of five different fermented chilli sauces, which they have just begun to sell in local supermarkets, with a number of “chilli nerds” hot on their tail.

“There’s people who like hot sauce and then there are chilli nerds like Brendan and I,” Ms Crocker said.

“We meet other chilli nerds on the Sunshine Coast all the time, and we convert people into chilli nerds when they try our sauces.

“Our sauces are sugar-free, vegan and raw, with no fillers, just flavour, and you’d be surprised at how many flavours different chillies can produce.”

The sauce range - red, green, smoky, hot and real hot - are made up of fermented chillies that take 12 painstaking weeks to process.

The couple juggle the demands of their cafe with the production of their sauce range which requires significant forward planning due to the extensive processing time.

“Given the fermenting process is 12 weeks long we have to be thinking ahead at all times,” Ms Crocker said.

“We have finally got a handle on that process and so we are starting to sell the products wholesale to supermarkets now because we can guarantee supply.”

It’s not unusual for friends and family from the region to be roped into chopping chillies for an entire day when The Village Pickle is closed on a Monday.

“We sometimes have 100kg of chillies to process and we have had so much support from our friends and family and other connections we’ve made through the Sunshine Coast Food and Agribusiness Network to get this venture off the ground,” Ms Crocker said.

“We are so grateful for the good people we have around us and who have helped us to get to where we are.”