Page 17 - Food & Drink Magazine July 2018

globally, so much so that big companies are starting to get involved.
These days Silly Yak Foods sees itself as a special dietary requirements food company.
“GF is too narrow a niche, because we cater to a lot of other dietary requirements. We are a clean label company. We are a nut-free environment because a lot of our consumers are children with multiple food intolerances. A lot of our product is also made to be low in fructose and/or safe for people who are following the low FODMAP diet.”
selling a treat product which is, relatively speaking, healthy and palatable, that won’t make them sick afterwards.”
Ingredients are of Australian origin “where it makes sense”, and there are certain regions from which Pears would not buy raw ingredients because those regions lack “proper worker rights” or a clean, green growing environment.
The company also handles everything in-house.
“We source raw materials, elaborately transform them into finished product and then pack
“ The objective is to get properly bedded down in Singapore as a gateway to South-East Asia, and in Dubai as a gateway to the Middle East and North Africa region.”
see it was in its infancy with a genuine market niche that needed to be served.”
What Pears didn’t like was the lack of respect he felt those needing gluten-free (GF) foods deserved. He saw an industry which supplied products that people “had to eat, so who cares if it tastes good, they haven’t got any options”.
“So I thought there’s got to be an opportunity in this niche for a business that is prepared to treat its customers with respect rather than contempt.
“I thought it would be a solid niche in which one could make a respectable living. It has turned out to be a much larger market than any of us who have been here for a long time expected it to be. It continues to grow at double-digit growth
HAND-CRAFTED
Silly Yak products are predominantly handmade at the moment.
“We try to maintain an old-fashioned product kind of look and feel. The reality is that we’re going to reach a point with a number of products where we have to make a decision about whether or not we want to move up the continuum towards food technology a bit more to allow us to automate more.
“But we won’t do that where it degrades mouth feel or if we’re putting things in which are fundamentally not that healthy for people to eat. That would be a philosophical breach of faith with our consumers.
“It’s very important to know who you are in business, in my view, and who you’re not. We don’t make muesli, we’re not interested in making drinks. We are a bakery manufacturer and we are gluten and nut-free. And that intersection defines who we are.”
For Pears though, there’s also something else.
“We put the fun back into the people’s lives. What we do here is give people who have multiple food intolerances and who are spending their whole lives being treated like lepers, the opportunity to be normal for a little while. That’s really what we’re selling. And we are
them in a gluten-free and nut-free environment, into impermeable packaging and ship them out the door.”
As well as its own products, the business contract manufactures several products going into mainstream retail, and also sells its brands to the hospitality sector, including thousands of GF pizza bases a week into the pizza bar trade, as well as cocktail products for catering and conferences.
While Silly Yaks doesn’t currently do online sales, it’s something it is working on for a “particular group of our products where we know we can get the fulfilment right, considering they’re preservative-free” in the second half of this year.
EXPORT FOCUS
In April, Pears went to Food & Hotel Asia to further distribution in Asia.
“We have a relationship with an organisation in Singapore that imports our products and distributes them into both retail and food service, and
we have products with the NTUC FairPrice, which is one of the big two supermarkets over there.”
There are also some online sales through RedMart in Asia, a small amount of product goes to
www.foodanddrinkbusiness.com.au | July 2018 | Food&Drink business | 17
RISING STAR
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