Yes, pineapples.

The Mosman-based digital strategist and mum of three is the creator of networking platform The Female Social Network, which among other things, allows business-owning mums to grow and commercialise, using social media as a tool.

Mums recommend products to one another organically and honestly via social media — they don’t ‘influence’ — and brands respond financially.

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“We call our women ‘effective opinion leaders’, not ‘influencers’,” said Bendall, 52, who has aggregated 17.5 million women across Australia, the UK and the USA under The Female Social Network umbrella, putting her in the running for NSW Businesswoman of the Year. “My purpose is to bring positive change for women running their own businesses,” she said.

“A lot of brands have been insulting to these women, offering them $500 per post.

“We’re like, ‘That’s rubbish’ — they could change the consumption of those products.

“We say, ‘You need to invest properly in this audience of mums, and they will organically tell other people’.”

In early 2018, with the help of a group of hand-picked women in her network and at the bequest of Queensland’s pineapple farmers, a million Australian sports-watching mums swapped their kids’ halftime oranges for pineapples.

“They (the farmers) said, ‘How could we work with The Female Social Network? We’ve got the lowest consumption of pineapples in the world in Australia, can your mums change this?’,” said Bendall.

“This was not, ‘Let’s get more pineapples on pillows’, this was ‘Let’s change consumption’.

“We took four women from the 1.5 million mums in The Female Social Network that we thought could change consumption, and took them to the farm.

“They learned pineapples contain an enzyme called Bromelain, which is an excellent sports recovery aid.

“Those women got one million mums in Australia to swap oranges for pineapples at halftime, because it was better for their kids.

“We gave half the money we were paid to the four women, because for every $1 The Female Social Network earns, a woman earns a dollar.”

Bendall’s business model makes perfect sense.

After all, women have been recommending products to one another since the dawn of time. “My granny would look over her fence and say to her neighbour, ‘Mabel, your whites aren’t as white as mine because you don’t use Surf’,” she said.

“Social media and technology have not changed human behaviour. We’re still a big recommendation economy, so we have turned that into a commercial model.”

Moreover, said Bendall, “the biggest users of Facebook and Instagram are mothers over 30, because women collaborate and recommend in groups.”

“If you look at statistics in America, 70- 80 per cent of people using Facebook and Instagram are mums.”

Bendall, who has two grown up kids (“They are older and doing very well in the world,” she said) as well as a 15-year-old daughter, has a wealth of digital experience, but it was her own struggle as a single mum back in London in her native UK, that set the dominoes off with a flourish and ultimately directed her focus towards helping mums.

Stuck in an ailing relationship and having previously worked her way up from staff writer to group marketing director for a consumer electronics title, she set up a business to cover the cost of childcare.

It was successful, so she sold up, finding herself pregnant again — and then her husband left. “He didn’t give me any maintenance — he never has ever, not one penny,” she said.

“If I didn’t have money, then I didn’t feed the kids. There were times when I really struggled. Pizza Hut used to do buffets and my mum would take me on a Sunday with the kids, and I would take a plastic pot to put extra food in, because we were that broke.

“I was determined I wouldn’t be a cliche, but this was in Thatcher’s Britain, and to be honest, they did nothing to help (single mothers).

“There’s nothing on the agenda to help women or mothers get back in the workplace.”

As it turned out, Bendall was “quite good” at running a business and started another one, while pregnant, securing high profile clients such as Virgin and the BBC.

At the BBC, she was the first person to introduce paid SMS services (soccer results) on mobile phones.

“I made the BBC a lot of money, but I was just taking a small consulting fee,” she said.

With Virgin, she worked on the development of Virgin Holidays and alongside Richard Branson on his attempt to circumnavigate the world in a hot-air balloon.

It was during these years at the end of the 1990s, that the working mum met an Australian called Duncan Bendall, her now-husband of 19 years (when we talk, the couple have just renewed their vows at resort Qualia on Hamilton Island. “It was far more emotional than I was expecting,” she said).

He was working in London, “like every Australian does,” she said.

“We met ironically through my ex-husband, who was sharing a flat with him, and we were very good friends for a couple of years before we started a relationship. We’ve been together ever since.”

Pregnant with their daughter Izzy, and along with her then eight- and nine-year-old children, the couple moved to Australia and started a third business — a digital consulting firm called Bendalls Group.

“I started a business with every child, because clearly that’s a great time to start a business and move house,” she said.

The family settled in Mosman, where Duncan, whose brother is former Mosman deputy mayor Roy Bendall, was raised.

“He’s a Mosman boy, born and bred, so I have Mosman to thank for providing a husband,” she said. “And what a stunning place. Izzy goes to Queenwood. It has given her a lifestyle in a community I believe is second to none in the world.”

While growing Bendalls Group in Australia, the entrepreneur, with her background in the psychology and technology space, began to observe behaviours in groups on social media, realising there was a huge group of mothers starting businesses mainly because they couldn’t afford childcare.

“Mums are the biggest growth in start ups. I did it in my 20s, but generally around the age of 35 or 50, women are starting businesses and there’s a reason.

“Either their husbands lose their jobs (and if a man loses his job at that age he won’t get re-employed) or they’re a divorce statistic. So you have this massive group of women, who are 35-plus, starting their own businesses. Yet start-up land typically caters for males ages 18-27.

“I got really pissed off about it, basically.

“I realised that a lot of the mums networked online — some were good and some were really bad. I had come across a couple whose figures just weren’t right, whose data wasn’t right and who were not being led properly, and the majority weren’t making any money.

“So I started to aggregate the best networks under an umbrella of The Female Social Network and started to help those women commercialise their audiences. That’s how The Female Social Network started — it was purely from passion.”

Teaming up with former Federal Small Business Minister Bruce Billson, who championed the venture, Bendall encouraged clients to invest in her businesswomen.

“I started to get money flowing in through these networks. I worked with Bruce and we got female entrepreneurship on the government agenda for the first time in Australian history.”

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In addition, Bendall — an active member of The Australian Institute of Company Directors and named on a 2015 Westpac/AFR Women of Influence list — has spent the last three years trying “very hard” to get a finance and business education program accredited by the NSW government and encourage banks to be favourable when considering loans to women with start-ups. “We did a survey last year that shows most women are funding businesses off their credit cards,” she said. “I’ve done it with my businesses.”

There is no doubt Bendall is running a profitable business, but it is clear she is passionate about helping women — probably because she has walked down Struggle Street herself.

“For me, I found the resilience, and I am lucky I did, because there were days when I didn’t want to get out of bed. I look back and I don’t know how I did it. I just put one foot in front of the other — a classic mum,” she said.

Those difficult London days would make winning the accolade NSW Businesswoman of the Year all the more meaningful. “I would really love Mosman to vote for me,” she said.