Tasmanian food revolution based on unprocessed produce
Tasmania, long a seachange destination, is developing a new reputation: as a land of business opportunities.
It’s not an obvious career move: leaving safe, high-powered jobs in London to follow a hunch about making salt on the east coast of Tasmania. However, the extraordinary journey taken by Chris Manson and Alice Laing in turning the pristine waters of Great Oyster Bay into a start-up success story — Tasman Sea Salt — is indicative of a far broader trend.
Tasmania, long a seachange destination, is developing a new reputation: as a land of business opportunities. Locals, expats and newcomers alike are behind a host of innovative food-related start-ups that marry the state’s “clean, green” brand and bountiful resources with its growing reputation for fine food and wine (as well as cider, gin and whisky).
Aiding the food boom is a strong new cafe and restaurant culture, particularly in Hobart, and a stellar rise in tourism.
For Manson, a born and bred Tasmanian who left for broader horizons, and English wife Laing, the desire to develop their own business coincided with the slow gestation of a particular concept.
“The seed was planted when I saw a documentary about salt while we were still living in the UK and it said, ‘There’s an endless natural resource and you get it for free,’ ” Manson recalls. “And I thought, ‘OK, that’s a good business model.’
“Then we came back to Tassie for a holiday to visit family and saw that my parents were using (British salt) Maldon, which seemed crazy. We thought, ‘Surely, there’s a local sea salt, even in (mainland) Australia,’ and they said, ‘Well, no, not really’ … and that planted the idea even more firmly.”
Seawater tests and further investigation showed Tasmania’s east coast had the two key ingredients needed for the product and the evaporative process they had in mind — pure, nutrient-rich seawater and a dry atmosphere. “So it’s not this romantic idea that we came back … to live the good life in Tasmania,” says Manson. “Being brutally honest, the bigger reason was that we saw an incredible business opportunity here that could be drawn from an amazing resource.”
The couple moved to Swansea in October 2013 and found a site for an evaporation plant nearby at Little Swanport, coincidentally only a few kilometres from the ruins of an 1830s salt works. They started selling their Tasman Sea Salt Flakes in July 2014 and quickly found strong demand from chefs and provedores.
The product is now used by most of Tasmania’s finest restaurants as well top eateries in Sydney, Perth, Melbourne and Brisbane, leading provedores in four states, and premium food producers, from bakers to chocolatiers. Production has risen to about a tonne a week.
The salt is lower in sodium and higher in potassium than many. “The incredibly nutrient-rich water provides for a great tasting salt — a slightly stronger, more robust flavour,” Chris explains. “Chefs say it has a well-rounded palate to it, which sounds a little like wine talk, but it is noticeable. It’s a stronger salty hit but doesn’t give you that astringent taste that a lot of salts do.”
The couple is just one example of what is being called Tasmania’s “food revolution”.
Assisted by irrigation projects, the state’s agriculture is expanding and the value of its produce is projected to increase 10-fold by 2050.
Demand for high quality food and foodie experiences is fuelled, too, by surging tourism. Visitor numbers rose from 500,000 in 2001 to the present 1.15 million and are projected to reach 1.5 million by 2020.
Culturally, the state is following the new money. There is a growing realisation that jobs for the next generation will be based on low-volume, high-quality produce and unique visitor experiences, rather than solely on extractive bulk commodities.
Not so long ago, stuck with nation-topping unemployment and a culture of mendicancy, Tasmania is becoming a state of food and tourism entrepreneurship. Its already well established food and beverage industries are rapidly expanding. The $500 million salmon trade is doubling by 2030; wine production is to treble by 2020, and; dairy — despite recent price shocks — has seen record foreign investment and average growth of 5 per cent a year for a decade.
However, it is the new start-ups that most impress. Few display lateral thinking better than Kai Ho, an edible seaweed harvesting company formed two ago, when marine biologist Craig Sanderson realised the potential value in invasive seaweeds accidentally introduced from the ballast of Japanese woodchip ships.
“You can spend decades researching these things but at some stage you have to walk the talk,” explains Sanderson. That meant teaming up with seafood processor, wholesaler and marketer James Ashmore to harvest and market the invasive seaweed species for human consumption.
“The thing that probably precipitated it was Fukushima (nuclear disaster) in Japan and the fact that waters in Asia are generally not as clean as they should be — so there is now demand for seaweeds sourced from outside Asia,” Sanderson says.
The main two products — wakame (or Undaria pinnatifida) and red lettuce (Grateloupia turuturu) — are harvested from the waters around Bruny Island and sold fresh, frozen or dried to restaurants and health food shops. “We are selling as much as we can make at the moment into most of the capital cities along the eastern seaboard — Adelaide, Melbourne, Sydney, Cairns, Brisbane — but we’re not pushing. People approach us,” he says.
Kai Ho (“Ocean’s Treasure” in Japanese) harvests up to 10 wet tonnes of the two introduced species of seaweed a year. Ashmore expects this to increase to 15 tonnes this season, which runs through the colder months.
The company has also applied to begin cultivating a native species, Mermaid’s Necklace, and trials are promising. “It looks like a string of small pearls … has a crunch when you bite into it and tastes like cucumbers,” Sanderson says. “We’re getting up to $1000 a kilo.”
Another new start-up flourishing on word of mouth is Long Name Farm, a free-range piggery on the east coast. Co-owner Phil Outtram crewed offshore oil and gas supply vessels, mostly off WA, but hankered to make a living from the land.
He and his partner, advertising sales executive Selina Smith, found a 18ha property, a mix of bush and pasture, on the banks of the Little Swanport River, and late in 2014 began to buy heritage pigs. They immediately found a market. “A lot of people buy our product because the pigs have been treated humanely and are not from an intensive piggery,” Outtram says.
Bred from Berkshire boars and Wessex saddleback sows, the “growers” — pigs sold to market, as opposed to breeding stock — forage naturally but are also fed a mix of wheat, barley and lupins, with a dash of fishmeal from a nearby salmon processor.
This combination of good breeding and feeding produces moist, full-flavoured pork. “The Berkshires get fat marbling through the meat, like Wagu (cattle),” explains Outtram.
As well as supplying top restaurants, Long Name supplies the popular Vermey’s Quality Meats in Sandy Bay, and sells “half a pig in a box” to a growing customer base direct via Facebook.
Long Name was coined after the Aboriginal name for the area, which, with 37 letters, is said to be the longest place name in Australia.
Such is demand that the couple’s present stock of about 150 growers will be scaled up to about 400 a year. “People are yearning for a flavoursome, quality product,” says Outtram.
The same simple desire is reshaping Tasmania.