Page 15 - Food&Drink Business magazine October 2022

RISINGSTAR ✷
“ The first of the Melbourne lockdowns ran for 42 days. Every day for those 42 days, I made a different flavour of plant-based ice cream.”
foods to suit allergen requirements for her extended family; realising “there isn’t one product for all of us”.
“That set me on the path. I got my own ice cream maker;
which I had sitting in the back of the pantry and I
decided to make my own gluten-free ice cream. “The first of the
Melbourne lockdowns ran for 42 days.
“Every day for those 42 days, I made a
different flavour of plant-based ice cream. I experimented with coconut, I tried soy, I used rice milk – some of them turned out really thin, some were really icy and short, some have a really strong coconut after taste.” White says.
Popular plant milks such as almond and coconut are largely unsustainable, which White wanted to avoid. She was looking for an alternative that was also sustainable and ideally local.
“Coconut milk is not great for the environment; it only grows in tropical areas and has been linked to a lot of deforestation, and I wasn’t happy using almond milk either – which uses a horrendous amount of water to produce.
“So that’s when I found hemp
seeds, and that was my breakthrough, and it became the base of the product. There’s a lot of confusion around hemp and the more I dug into it and looked at that, I realised it is actually a super food.
“I couldn’t see anyone doing it in the market. Certainly not in Australia,” says White.
Due to its diversity and eco-benefits, hemp has become more widely used in the production of textiles, biodegradable plastics, skincare, medicines, paper, paint and biofuel.
“It’s a wonder crop. It absorbs 22 tonnes of carbon dioxide per hectare, which is more than any other crop grown on land, and it requires limited water and no fertilisers or pesticides,” says White.
White is determined to make SuperSeed as sustainable as possible. The ice creme’s biodegradable packaging supports the regeneration of Australian rainforests, with the company having helped save 836 square metres of Australian rainforest so far.
Currently, SuperSeed operates out of a purpose-built commercial standard and allergen free kitchen, complete with an industrial ice cream maker supplied from Italy.
What started with 42 experiments culminated in five flavours.
White says SuperSeed is still working at an artisanal level, but with a reliable kitchen, recipe and demand in place, the next step is to scale up. She is currently working with two co-manufacturers and a Victorian distributor.
“We are producing low volume, premium ingredient products; that’s our stage and the classic stage for any start-up. It is the level we have been operating for the last
18 months. What’s becoming quickly apparent is we can do hundreds of litres, but we can’t do thousands.
“FMCG is a volume game; it’s low margin, high volume, and you have to get scale. We’re at that stage of knowing we have to ‘scale or fail’. This has to get bigger to be a viable business,” says White. ✷
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www.foodanddrinkbusiness.com.au | October 2022 | Food&Drink business | 15