Jenna and Tom Stefanovic trade media jobs for farm living
The couple swap city careers for life on a vast almond farm and the thrill – and challenge – of launching their own food venture.
Jenna Dinicola Stefanovic rarely starts her work day without first slipping into a pair of well-worn leather Blundstone boots. Because when you’re running around a 607-hectare almond farm, scaling a family business and raising two preschoolers, reliable shoes are essential.
The 38-year-old’s impressive collection of designer heels – amassed during her former career as a fashion publicist – rarely get a look-in these days. It’s this fondness for practical footwear, and tractor skills, which husband and business partner Tom Stefanovic considers two of her most endearing qualities.
“We’d been dating for a few months and Jenna invited me to visit her family’s farm, and one of the [employees] had gone home sick,” the former cameraman tells WISH from the pair’s office at Mandolé Orchard, the sprawling property at Lake Wyangan, near the southern New South Wales town of Griffith, that they now call home. “So Jenna just goes inside and puts on a pair of stubby shorts and Blundstones, and I’m thinking, ‘That’s hot’.” She then disappeared for three hours, leaving me to make small talk with her mum Annette.
“She’d gone out to help with the harvest,” he continues, “and at that point I just thought, ‘Wow, I’m gonna marry you’.”
The pair met at an event on the Gold Coast while both working for Channel 9, but, too nervous to ask for her number, it was Stefanovic’s big brother, Today show host Karl, who played Cupid. The day after their first meeting, “Karl was giving it to me the whole broadcast”, Dinicola Stefanovic recalls. “He was saying things on air like, ‘Have you met my brother, Jenna? What do you think of my brother?’.”
A few days later, a note from the TV host appeared on her desk. “It said ‘Tom is very shy’, and had his mobile number on it. I ended up texting him, and the rest is history.”
On August 22, 2015, surrounded by their friends, family and thousands of blossoming almond trees, the couple married. Looking back, they concede their wedding day – timed to coincide with the harvest’s most beautiful phenological phase – was auspicious.
“We didn’t know at the time, but we actually got married on World Plant Milk Day,” Dinicola Stefanovic says, conceding that in addition to daughter Queenie, four, and Phoenix, two, plant milk, specifically the type made from almonds, is akin to their “third baby”.
Stefanovic readily admits he never imagined his future career lay in “almond milking”. But in 2017, having noticed the lack of fresh, minimally processed almond milk options available, the newlyweds packed up their lives in Sydney and moved to Dinicola Stefanovic’s family farm to launch Mandolé Orchard, Australia’s first single-origin almond milk brand.
Three generations now live and work together on the land that Jenna’s grandfather Armando Dinicola first purchased in the late 1970s after emigrating from northern Italy. “My grandparents, they were immigrants who came from a very poor background, so they basically arrived here from Italy with nothing,” Dinicola Stefanovic explains.
“Just thinking about the hardships they faced gets me emotional. They didn’t speak the language. They had no money, no friends or family and no accommodation. And then they set up these farms, and they just worked so hard.”
She describes the gnarled appearance of the hands of her grandmother Tilly, now 97, arthritic and twisted from decades of manual farm work.
“My grandfather also had really bad back problems and all these physical ailments from all the hard labour; their bodies really suffered,” she says.
Her father Denis eventually took over the farm and in 2004, together with his son Dean, gradually replaced the rice and wheat crops with almonds. The Dinicolas are now a major player in the almond market. The product, about 80 per cent of which is exported to more than 50 countries including China and India, is expected to reach a net value of $1.3 billion within the next year and is now one of the country’s most lucrative horticultural exports.
It’s also one of the thirstiest, requiring between 8.5 and 14 megalitres of water per hectare during growing season, depending on the region. But Stefanovic says Australia’s almond industry is leading the charge in sustainable practices, and their company has invested greatly in farming technologies to ensure their operations are as water efficient as possible.
The company is now able to determine the precise water needs of their trees via soil and stress analysis, and water from their manufacturing facility is now recycled back into the orchard. This, Stefanovic explains, has reduced the farm’s water consumption to 30 per cent less than the industry average.
“It was definitely, you know, a light-bulb moment,” Dinicola Stefanovic says, recalling the moment they conceived the idea of scaling her mother’s almond milk recipe to produce commercially.
“We recognised how special and unique the almonds they were growing were and subsequently how special Mum’s homemade almond milk was when we couldn’t find anything like it in Sydney. But when you start bringing in different bits of equipment and you’re trying to make large quantities of it, it’s hard to keep that quality. It was very, very difficult to do and it took us a long time to develop.”
It took two years to perfect the product, and in May 2019, they made their inaugural delivery to their first stockist, Broomes Fruit & Vegetables in nearby Griffith. “It was a Friday afternoon,” says Stefanovic.
“I don’t think we slept that night; we were so nervous, and then at about two o’clock in the afternoon, we got a text from Mim, the owner, and it said ‘Sold out’.”
“We just started jumping up and down in the kitchen,” adds Dinicola Stefanovic, who was seven months pregnant with Queenie at the time. “We cracked open a bottle of Champagne; everyone in the family was so excited.
“We knew there was a lot of hard work to come, but it was a small yet significant milestone for us.”
The next hurdle? Getting the brand in front of potential customers. That involved clocking up thousands of kilometres travelling to major cities, including Sydney and Melbourne, to meet suppliers and showcase their activated almond milk at local markets. “We’d travel up to Sydney on Thursday afternoon, do a couple of deliveries to the local independents who first gave us a shot – which we’re very grateful for – and then do the Northern Beaches markets on Friday and North Sydney markets and Carriageworks on the Saturday,” Stefanovic says.
Today, the brand supplies more than 500 outlets across the country with its products, which now includes almond butters and whole nuts. They’ve also expanded into Singapore and are fielding interest throughout Asia. Despite the brand’s early success and growing team, Dinicola Stefanovic says the couple is still doing much of the heavy lifting, both figuratively and literally.
WISH met the pair again a week later during their visit to Sydney to set up the brand’s stall at the 2024 Sydney Royal Easter Show.
“The next few weeks are going to be really hectic,” Dinicola Stefanovic says, still weary from their six-hour drive from Mandolé Orchard to Sydney that morning. They open the back of the refrigerated truck to reveal the hundreds of boxes of almond milk they will be showcasing at the annual agricultural event.
For Stefanovic, creating Mandolé Orchard has been incredibly humbling.
“We’ve developed the knowledge over time, but when we started, we knew nothing about food,” he says. “We didn’t understand the rules or regulations, we didn’t know how to make a product.
“And you’re dealing with nature. You’re in this dance and she’s always leading, so you’ve got to adapt and you’ve got to evolve. It’s given me a new appreciation for food and understanding of the challenges the people who grow this incredible produce face getting a product from the paddock onto the shelf.”
As for whether their kids will want to continue the family legacy, Stefanovic
remains unsure.
“We’ve been placed in a fortunate position where, you know, it’s something that Jenna and I are interested in and we really love what we’re doing, but if the kids don’t want to do it, there’s no pressure,” he says.
That said, their eldest has already started offering feedback on product development.
“Queenie is our biggest critic,” he says, laughing, adding that Phoenix, like his uncle Dean, loves anything with a motor.
All work stops however, when the youngest members of the city-dwelling Stefanovic's – Karl and Jasmine’s daughter Harper, and Peter Stefanovic and Sylvia Jeffreys’ sons Oscar and Henry – pay a visit to the vast estate.
“They go mental,” says Dinicola Stefanovic of the five cousins, who are all aged between two and four. “But it’s such good fun,” adds Stefanovic. “It adds character, I think; a bit of time spent in the country.”
This story is from the May issue of WISH.
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