Page 23 - Food&Drink Magazine November-December 2021

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Sobah, so good
An Indigenous-owned non-alcoholic brewery on Queensland’s Gold Coast is taking its craft and storytelling to new heights in 2021.
PURPOSE, place, story and lore: these are the elements at the core of Sobah. Husband and wife team Dr Clinton and Lozen Schultz have adamantly infused these principles into the business since it launched as Australia’s first non-alcoholic craft beer in 2017.
When sitting with Clinton Schultz – a psychologist and academic by profession – at Sobah’s Gold Coast-based headquarters in Burleigh Heads, it doesn’t take long to see how important it is for him to share and support Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander businesses and stories through Sobah.
“There’s nothing that really throws a lot of that stereotypical rubbish back in the face of, I guess, the majority population,
more than being a strong, proud, Gamilaroi man running a non-alcoholic beer company, and everything being infused or brewed with our traditional foods,” says Schultz.
Native ingredients such as Davidson Plum, Wattleseed, Aniseed Myrtle, Boab and Pepperberry are delicately infused and sourced in individual Sobah varieties, whether as part of its core or seasonal ranges. Schultz told Food & Drink Business the team tries to source ingredients from where they are naturally grown as much as possible.
Despite being a non-alcoholic beer, Sobah is brewed the same way as any other beer. Its point of difference is the strain of yeast it uses, which ensures the
beer is alcohol-free. It was the post production process, which was the “expensive learning curve” of Sobah’s R&D.
“We had to do a few tweaks to the recipes to ensure we weren’t impacting on the profiles of the products, and that we were still getting the flavours we wanted at the end of pasteurising, and it has worked out well,” he says.
Sobah plans to rebrand its core range this year, with some of its new, limited batches already rolling out with fresh
designs across cans and cartons.
It has also entered an investment round to not only help grow the business and establish
Sobah as Australia’s first, full non-alcoholic brew café and commercial brewery.
Schultz says: “The majority of our team at Sobah come from a marginalised background and struggle with what others may see as a disability or barrier to them engaging with mainstream employment. We want to be able to create employment opportunities and training for them, and that’s been really rewarding to do at the level we already have.” ✷
Hard head in the clouds
PAOLA and Michael Karamallis’ part-time experiment spinning up clouds of sweet joy to sell at local markets steadily grew to become Australia’s most-awarded fairy floss brand. Paola Karamallis always dreamed of owning her own café instead of working for someone else. But despite more than
15 years’ experience in hospitality, real estate agents would not take her seriously.
Even though the profits weren’t huge, Michael remembers feeling on cloud nine when Paola returned from a day at the markets with close to $1000 just from selling fairy floss.
The couple worked out that if she could sell five times that amount of fairy floss in a week, Paola could afford to quit her weekday job and save up to make her café dream a reality.
Except it didn’t quite work out like that.
“Call it serendipity, but about six months in, I was made redundant from my role as a customer experience manager and had the opportunity to invest my time completely into Fluffy Crunch,” says Michael.
In those early days of working together the couple set up stores at as many as events aspossible,oftenuptosixinaweek.Every
event was also a testing ground for new flavour experiments and which event formats brought in the most money.
By 2018, they’d settled on a winning combination of fewer but larger events, like Vivid Sydney, Canberra’s Floriade, and the Royal Melbourne Show. At the show, they sold more than 25 eye-catching, taste-bud- thrilling fairy floss flavours with a host of magical sprinkles such as freeze-dried fruit, edible glitter, popping candy and powdered Nutella. Not surprisingly, young people gave
their products a lot of love on Instagram and Facebook.
Up until February 2020, big events like the Royal Shows andVivid brought in more than 80 per cent of Fluffy Crunch’s revenue.
Then the pandemic hit, wiping out a full calendar of nearly 100 events including 13 major multi-day shows.
That said, going all in on ecommerce paid off in other ways for the Karamallis family: it allowed them to expand the business to new areas and increase revenue with more control, and Paola reports that not having to prepare for events meant they had most weekends free to spend more time with their daughter.
Paola’s original dream of running a café with Michael was inspired by memories of how happily they’d worked together for other people earlier in their relationship.
Though working together for someone else compared to for themselves did require some adjustments.
“We’ve always been a good team but working together on Fluffy Crunch we had to learn new skills and see what we each had to complement the business best,” she says,smiling. ✷
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