Having worked in product innovation for food and beverage multinationals like Mondelez, Kraft Foods, Mars, and Asahi Beverages, SuperSeed founder Susie White knew how to tap into an emerging food trend. Pippa Haupt writes.
As Covid lockdowns continued into 2021, and with a fresh diagnosis as a coeliac, food and beverage innovation specialist Susie White was prompted to reassess her eating habits.
Also aware of the growing popularity of the plant-based food movement, White began experimenting at home, to create a gluten-free, vegan ‘icecream’.
Over 12 months of trial and error, White bootstrapped her way to building a dedicated allergen-free kitchen in the Yarra Ranges, completed training to become a gelatiere chef, and worked alongside a food technician to perfect the creamy, vegan and allergen-friendly recipe that became SuperSeed ice creme.
White says she owes her love of creating things to a youth spent on her family’s vineyard, growing up in a ‘making products’ environment.
“I grew up on a family vineyard in north east of Victoria in Yakandandah. No one knew where that was, but my parents were pretty much the first entrepreneurs I knew.
“My early years were spent working on the winery in the vineyard. I remember every harvest time we’d be putting on labels, heat sealing, and corking the bottles.
“Seeing people enjoy and have appreciation for the final product made me love creating things,” says White.
From there, White attended Monash University, completing a double degree in business and arts, with majors in marketing and psychology.
“I knew that the motivation of people buying products and what people found attractive about food was really motivating to me, and that launched me into a corporate career,” White says.
White embarked on a career with a series of multinational food and beverage companies, developing skills in identifying future trends, product development and taking products to market. Her true passion was for all the whole process; product development, manufacturing, supply chain, branding, advertising, and launching products into market.
Prior to her exit from the corporate world, White saw first-hand the impending rise of the plant-based movement.
“It was the biggest and the most persuasive trend. I saw it really changing entire landscapes across multiple categories – every category was impacted by it,” says White.
White tapped into the trend even further after her diagnosis.
“After I had been diagnosed with coeliac and during the Covid lockdowns, I looked further into gluten and could not believe what it was in.
“The fact that it is in ice cream is kind of a crime; it is in there because it’s the cheapest thickener and sweetener. That is why it is used as a base for a lot of sauces,” says White.
A turning point came during Melbourne’s first bout of Covid lockdowns, when she was rummaging through the freezer, trying to find suitable 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.
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 18months. 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.
This article first appeared in the October edition of Food & Drink Business magazine.
