The Foodprint Experience - Adelaide CBD
Mel has taken a long, winding road to running a sustainable cafe, from overseas farmstays to the permaculture diploma that gave birth to the whole idea. Now, with a cozy space, delicious food, and a mind full of new ideas, Mel talks to us about the journey and where it might take her next.
The key stats.
● Year established: June 2018
● Location: The Joinery, 111 Franklin Street, Adelaide
● Land: Café space rental from the Joinery
● Water: Mains paid through the Joinery
● Energy: Solar & mains
● Capital: $30,000 in initial costs including equipment, $3-5,000 in company registration, then extra ongoing for things like insurance and renovation costs.
● Labour: Mel works full-time at the cafe alongside two other full-timers - one barista and one chef, often with a casual work experience student. There are also one or two extra employees who work at a small coffee cart at the Medical Centre in Walkerville
● Production: In-house and catering food with a focus on low food miles, sustainability, and ethics
● Suppliers/Inputs: Local businesses and farmer-direct wherever possible, including Skala Bakery, a local fruit and veg supplier, Barossa Meats, and Feather & Peck eggs
● Markets: A weekday customer base made up largely of office workers looking for a quiet, open café space and sustainable lunchtime meals
What’s the project, in a nutshell?
“Our tagline is food that makes you feel good while doing good,” says Mel with a smile, which in a nutshell does about sum it up. Mel’s social enterprise café, the Foodprint Experience, is nestled on the bottom floor of the Joinery on Franklin Street, and over the last few years Mel has built it from the ground up with the vision of creating a business that is good for people as well as the planet.
The business operates much like any other café, however being a social enterprise means that they are guided by the values and goals Mel wrote in her impact statement when first starting the business. Of the profits, 50% are reinvested back into the business and the community surrounding it, and sustainability and the community are forefront in the day-to-day running of the business. From the simple little systems like separating waste streams, to bigger decisions about building a locally-sourced, sustainable menu, and long-term projects to give back to the community like Mel’s work experience program for young people.
“It’s really about building their confidence and their skill sets so that they feel more comfortable to go on and find employment down the track”, she says, adding “you take it for granted, these little things, but they can mean a lot to someone”.
Not only that, but the café is steadily growing and exploring new avenues, like with the catering arm of the business that often accounts for up to 50% of the business, and the new coffee cart that opened up last September at the ECH Medical Centre in Walkerville.
How did this all get started?
“Well… I love food!” Mel exclaims simply. “I wanted to do something meaningful… I had worked in hospitality and I’d worked in travel, and I came across permaculture and thought that was quite intriguing”.
This newfound curiosity about farming took her all the way to South America to travel, work as a WOOFer, and start learning about all things sustainable food and what part she might like to play. Circumstance pulled her back home, however, after a serious farm accident. “It wasn’t for me,” Mel said of the farm life, and realising this she began looking into different avenues she might like to explore with food. It wasn’t long before she found one.
“I went and did a postgrad diploma in permaculture,” Mel says. “I had to come up with a project that I found interesting that included the three ethics – earth care, people care and fair share – and [the café] is what I ended up modeling, although it has changed considerably from the original business plan.”
This model and all of the work building business plans, budgets and marketing strategies was what ended up motivating Mel to put her research project to the test, and with her diploma finished she got to work building her business.
“I don’t think I would’ve ended up with this,” she reflects, speaking about where she might be if it hadn’t been for the research project that initially formed the backbone of her business.
“It took a lot of research and consideration and planning.”
Mel didn’t dive straight into café ownership though, instead of starting off holding small stalls at markets to sell her delicious meals and nibbles. Before long the Conservation Council SA, owner of the Joinery, came to her with a proposal she couldn’t refuse, and in June 2018 the Foodprint Experience was born.
Setting up shop on the ground floor of the Joinery, with a lot of time, investment and hard work it grew from an empty, blank canvas into the cozy, creatively-designed space it is now.
Any tips for those wanting to start something similar?
For Mel, starting with good mentors, resources and support is absolutely critical.
“Get a good accountant!” is one of her strongest recommendations. Mel invested a lot in having the right people around her that she could go to for advice, from accountants to consultants, but says it was completely worth it.
Despite having a number of great resources while setting up the business though, there are still more opportunities she wishes she’d taken and knowledge she wishes she’d had.
“Go and do the Café in a Box course. It walks you through every part of the process of starting a food business,” Mel explains. “And get some understanding of numbers – talk to lots of people, and prepare to work really, really hard. Harder than you ever have in your life,” Mel laughs, “but know that it’s incredibly rewarding.”
“Know your why… your why will get you through all those shitty times when you want to quit and cry and walk away from it.”
“Have you had some of those moments then?” I ask, and we both laugh.
“Yes… Yes I have.”
What’s been the biggest challenge so far?
“Everything takes longer than you expect, everything is harder than you expect,” Mel tells me, thinking back on the early days of the café.
Starting a business is notorious for its challenges. From day one, Mel was learning whole new skill sets on the fly, from budgets to team management to marketing strategies, and she admits that it was a steep learning curve.
“The biggest challenge was understanding things financially… and communication. You have to be a really good communicator.”
Understanding how the finances of running a café work from a technical standpoint is a big undertaking. Bigger still though in Mel’s case was the constant challenge of aligning her values with the business and reconciling these two things — budget and vision. Often the more sustainable, ethical choices were a no-brainer and easy to implement at a low cost. Setting up a separate bin system for waste in the front and back of house, for example. Other times, it wasn't as easy to bring the two together.
“I used to be quite rigid about who my suppliers were and really specific about how sustainable they were, how local, so at one point I was doing an average 42km radius that I sourced all my food from… now I’m a little more flexible on that, because if you’re not you can blow out your costs. Which is what I did initially.”
“The reality sometimes when you’re going to a small boutique farmer is the costs can be huge… if we were a restaurant doing higher-cost products that would work really well and I’d love to do that, but we’re a lunchtime café and people have ideas of what lunch should cost, so you kind of have to work within the market that you’ve got while not compromising your values too much.”
The cafe’s customer base is a diverse, loyal mix of people with different value systems, budgets and reasons for loving and supporting the café. Often this includes sharing Mel’s commitment to sustainability, but for others the café simply represents a cosy, atmospheric spot a short stroll down the road from work where they can get an affordable, tasty lunch or meet colleagues over coffee.
“You have to be careful. We have a lot of office workers, so you don’t want to shut out all of that market [with high lunch prices].”
“Sometimes it’s really frustrating and you do feel like you’re compromising whatever it is you’re trying to achieve,” Mel admits.
“Sometimes people come in and they say, ‘why is this so expensive?’. And it’s a $9.90 croissant that’s made by a French pâtissier from down the road… [it’s] a really special product, that’s why you pay a little bit more.”
It was a balance that was starting to become familiar and tentatively manageable for Mel up until February 2020, when suddenly all of that got turned on its head.
Those daily office workers trickling in for morning coffee or a light lunch were suddenly working from home, and as the lockdowns went on the café’s doors were forced to stay closed.
It’s a very familiar story for the industry. Even as regulations eased and workers slowly began moving out of their home offices and back into the city, over the past few years Mel has had to make some hard decisions.
There were times when she wasn’t sure she’d be able to afford to reopen at all, and as a small business treading the fine line of profitability is a constant struggle.
“You have to consider that on a regular basis… and it’s a pretty heavy weight to carry sometimes.”
Despite it all though, the Foodprint Experience has weathered the storm. Thanks to their resilience and adaptability, Mel and the café are making it through – armed with take-home ready meals for customers to purchase online and a growing range of relishes and jams.
“It’s not an easy gig but it’s worth it,” Mel says warmly.
What’s the best part?
“I love talking if you hadn’t noticed,” Mel laughs.
“I like making people feel good. It’s seeing people light up and having a chat. We get to know our customers as well, and taking on the students… It’s great to see them grow and develop. I feel so proud.”
Every now and then Mel’s tight-knit team is joined by a young person keen to build their confidence and skills in a work environment, or simply to get out of the house and meet some new people and have a new experience. Mel talks affectionately of each of them and the ways they’ve grown, both in their time at the café and after they’ve moved on to exciting new things.
“[We’re] planting little seeds of change, and it’s really rewarding in that respect.”
Why support a local food network in South Australia?
“There are lots of reasons,” Mel begins, thinking.
“There are people that work really hard to make beautiful products, quality products, and it’s nice to support them. Our economy can’t work on just local,” she concedes, “you do have to have international trade, but trying to find ways of supporting people who are local [is a really valuable thing].”
“They’re doing something that they worked really hard for and have families to support, and I want to be a part of that. I want to be able to support their business just as much as I need them to support mine.”
Supporting your community and leaving the world better than you found it are such central tenets of Mel’s business and just a few of the great ways she sees a local food system being able to help us work towards a more resilient future.
Tell us about the future – what’s next?
“We’re in a sort of survival mode at the moment, but we’ve developed a bit of a retail range… so we’ve got our bush relish, we’ve got our bush dukkah,” says Mel pointing to a lineup of colourfully filled glass jars full with various house-made spreads, pickles, toppings and preserved lemons, and the collection is growing.
“We use a lot of native Australian ingredients and I think supporting indigenous businesses is really important too.”
“We want to see all different people in our community thrive and I think one way to support First Nations groups is being able to purchase their foods and products and use them respectfully.”
“We’ve also got a house-made body scrub made with our used coffee grounds,” Mel explains.
It’s such a simple and surprising yet incredibly sensible way to reuse a resource that otherwise might get wasted, and it strikes me as a beautiful representation of what the Foodprint Experience stands for.
Last but not least, Mel goes on to tell me proudly about the collection of cooking e-books she’s been gradually adding to, and is excited to work on the idea more.
“What I’d really like to do is turn it into a published solid book that has some extra information about the community, people profiles like some of our regular customers, stories about them, about the food and the community, how to build community capacity through food and environmental restoration. I’d like to get that done, I don’t know if that’s a ‘this year project’ but I’ve got a draft done.”
So far, Mel has put together four fabulous e-books.
One where you can learn about how to reuse and cook with food waste, another about cooking with native foods, a third with recipe and tips for preserving and fermenting, and finally an e-book on plant-based cooking. All four of them can be found on the Foodprint Experience’s online store, and be sure to keep your eyes peeled for more to come.
Get in touch:
Website | www.thefoodprintexperience.com.au
Facebook | The Foodprint Experience
Instagram | @thefoodprintexperience