Page 16 - Food&Drink Jan-Feb 2022 magazine

✷ RISING STAR
Planting a good seed
When their active lifestyle was not enough to combat unexpected health concerns, The Good Seed founders Ivy Ong and Adrian Soon started looking at their diet. Varun Bodhi finds out how a personal ‘gut reset’ led to the creation of a better-for-you beverage business.
their venture that interest began to grow when small-scale retailers at farmers markets expressed interest in selling the kefir on their behalf.
“Then we were approached by a distributor and we realised we needed proper facilities and equipment,” Soon says.
At the start of 2017, the couple bought an old butcher’s facility in Hastings on Victoria’s Mornington Peninsula and four years later acquired their second factory in Carrum Downs in south-east Melbourne, providing ample room to grow.
A NEW DIRECTION
When the pandemic came along, Ong and Soon decided to redirect their focus from retail to direct-to-consumer and launch a second product, Sorted, a prebiotic fibre-rich drink.
Sorted is a 100 per cent natural low carbohydrate soft drink offering an alternative to artificially flavoured and sweetened beverages.
Ong and Soon determined the ideal flavours for their prebiotic drink after studying the market for several months.
The couple handed out samples throughout lockdown, tweaking flavours based on consumer feedback until they settled on Watermelon & Mint, Blood Orange, and Blackcurrant flavours for its launch.
WHEN life gives you lemons, turn them into lemonade the age-old saying goes, but for Ivy Ong and Adrian Soon, instead of making lemonade they created a functional beverages company offering a water kefir and the prebiotic fibre-rich beverage, Sorted.
In 2016, the pair were experiencing health problems that were impacting their quality of life.
“We’re both really active people and at that point in time I was training for an 85-kilometre ultra-marathon and Adrian had become a tennis coach. We decided we needed to eat better for our health.
“Little did we know that we’d become incredibly passionate about gut health and start
sharing our creations with our community,” Ong says
Looking for an easy to digest and better-for-you drink, the couple discovered water kefir, a natural dairy- free probiotic solution.
Similar to kombucha but maintaining a softer taste profile with a more diverse probiotic content, water kefir is made from adding water kefir crystals – which are a symbiotic culture of bacteria and yeast (SCOBY) – into a sugar solution. During the fermentation process the sugar is consumed by the crystals and turns into a bubbly probiotic drink.
SOWING THE GOOD SEED
When a friend would no longer accept their kefir for free, Ong
and Soon decided to try selling their product to a broader market and in 2017, The Good Seed was born.
“It was a steep learning curve for us because like any other food manufacturer we needed to meet food standards, so we started researching the best and healthiest practices,” says Ong.
Unable to work out of their small apartment, Ong and Soon found a shared space at the back of a little café in Camberwell, just outside the Melbourne CBD.
Ong would stick the labels onto bottles and Soon would fill them by hand.
They would then whip around in their little Honda Jazz, selling the kefir at farmers’ markets as well as doing home deliveries.
It was about four months into
16 | Food&Drink business | January-February 2022 | www.foodanddrinkbusiness.com.au