Here’s the problem: Australia is very good at digging stuff out of the ground, and it’s very good at planting loads of stuff in the ground and growing it. What the country isn’t so good at is making high-value products – whether they be minerals or food staples – out of those raw materials.
According to the Australian Bureau of Agricultural and Resource Economics (ABARE), the Australian food industry exports 95 per cent of food in bulk and in minimally (or substantially) transformed product categories. Only a small percentage of Australia’s food exports are represented by elaborately transformed produce such as confectionery products. In short, we’re not making enough good stuff.
Doug Cush of pasta company Bellata Gold doesn’t make sweets. But he did hit on a plan that transformed his farm from a grower of bulk commodities to a vertically integrated, increasingly international supplier of high-quality branded foods. He started making high-quality pasta, the kind for which he could charge nearly $5 for a 375g packet.
Cush says many Australians like to grow a commodity and sell it for as little as they possibly can. ‘To me,’ he says, ‘the farmers in this country don’t know enough about what happens at the other end of the chain.’
He lays the problem squarely at the feet of the English colonists. They instilled in Australians the idea we should buy from the government store, and sell to it. He has the Australian Wheat Board and its gun-toting bosses specifically in mind. ‘As a country we really haven’t matured,’ he notes.
Cush comes from a line of yeoman farmers. His grandfather arrived from England in 1908. ‘With three daughters I wanted to keep my farms,’ he says. ‘How could I keep my farms when two of them are CPA accountants?’
In the late 1980s he started rotating durum wheat, prized in pasta making, with his other crops. He was frustrated that when he sold the durum, it was mixed in with run-of-the-mill grain. ‘Unfortunately, under a monopoly-type situation, they take the good grain and put it with the rubbish grain,’ Cush explains. ‘We get $10 more and they get $10 less but they probably grow twice as much. The person who goes for quality is subsidising an industry.’
Frustrated that he wasn’t receiving world parity for his grain, Cush went to Italy in 2000. ‘We’d seen a few of the millers over there, and as a result of that trip I started exporting some grain in containers,’ he says.
‘We were given a permit from the WEA (Wheat Export Authority). Because we differentiated our product – as in we are chemical free, we don’t use any chemicals on our grain from the point of harvest – we were granted more permits.’
Eventually, the permits were withdrawn. Then in 2003, a container destined for Italy split on a Sydney wharf. Cush decided to have 20 tonnes milled and made into pasta, and arranged for it to be exhibited at that year’s Sydney Royal Fine Food Show.
Natalie Tydd CPA, who also happens to be Cush’s daughter, is in charge of Bellata Gold’s accounts. She says the company has been successful in moving from wheat growing to pasta making because both processes are parts of the same business. ‘I read in one of the INTHEBLACK articles about the Wiggles,’ she says. ‘One of the things about them that struck a cord with me is that they said, ‘Invest in things you know’. They were childcare people; they went on to childcare.
‘We were farmers. We grow durum wheat very well. We invested in what we knew. Then you just surround yourselves with the skills you don’t have. We didn’t know how to physically make pasta or physically mill it but we employed people who do. At the core of it, we knew about business and growing that initial product.
And we’ve always claimed that without the core ingredient being very good, it doesn’t matter what you do in those other stages. You’ll never have a good product if your raw ingredient isn’t good. We were able to guarantee that by growing it ourselves. The rest was a natural flow-on then.’
Bellata Gold scooped the pool in the Sydney Royal Fine Food Show awards, winning grand championship ribbons for both dry and fresh pasta. Cush then took it to another food festival and sold 900 packets in four hours. Word of mouth had spread. ‘The response we received over the next fortnight was phenomenal,’ Cush says. ‘People were ringing up and saying, ‘Where can we buy it?’
What Cush had created was a pasta with a distinctive taste, due to the quality of the durum wheat used. ‘It had taste and flavour, which pastas are not known or acknowledged for,’ he says. ‘And we infused some flavours in them, and it became a word-of-mouth product.’
Another of Cush’s daughters, Michelle Shaw, is Bellata Gold’s director of sales and marketing. She says it would be a mistake for the company to try and achieve mass sales through the shelves of mainstream supermarkets. ‘A lot of people who buy from supermarkets are just buying pasta as a filler, really,’ she says. ‘They are not interested in the fact that it has a unique taste.’
The company wants to sell only to discerning buyers. Currently, 25 distributors get the product onto the shelves of 600 outlets including delis and specialty shops. ‘We are targeting the top 5 per cent around the world,’ Shaw says. ‘The places where we sell a lot of our pasta are fruit shops and butchers. People who visit those stores are looking for better quality than just going to Woolworths or Coles. We are also in places like David Jones. We are in that high-end range.’
Says Cush: ‘What we sell our grain for and what we sell our semolina for and what we sell our pasta for, we set the price. We have got to live within a marketplace and what we think we can charge. But our pasta is twice as dear as anybody else’s. If you can’t taste the difference, you belong in Coles and Woolies anyway. [With Bellata Gold] you are getting a distinctive product.’
In addition to being in charge of the accounts, Tydd is responsible for the traceability of the product – something upon which Bellata Gold’s marketing centres. The Hazard Analysis Critical Control Point (HACCP) certification is a system of audits and compliance that traces every move from the planting of the crop onwards. ‘Every time our durum wheat crop is planted, sprayed or has anything done on it, it is all documented,’ Tydd says. ‘The chemicals coming on and off our farm [are] documented.’
Tydd explains that Cush’s attraction for HACCP stems from the fact that for his entire career he’s strived to avoid having his products commodified.
Cush’s model for business is now being used as a template from which other farmers can learn. ‘The model that I’ve created can be replicated in other industries,’ he says, ‘because it actually takes the ownership away from the supermarket and puts it back to the grower. It has 100 per cent traceability.’
Process timeline
The idea behind Bellata Gold is to take a commodity product – durum wheat – and make it into a quality branded product. An important part of this is ‘traceability’. This means every packet of pasta can be traced back through the process chain through manufacture, milling, storage and growing.
Drilling
Each year 2000ha of durum wheat is grown on Bellata Gold’s farms. The crop is drilled (planted) in May. Crop rotation helps minimise disease and maximise each crop’s yields. Once the durum comes back into rotation, residual levels of disease have dropped to a level that ensures the crop remains disease free.
Farm owner Doug Cush tries to minimise the chemicals used, and believes organic farming isn’t sustainable. ‘That’s the problem, regardless of what people say,’ he says. ‘People stay in the [organic farming] industry for about 10 years. They start with a viable farm, and they end up selling the farm 10 years later because they can’t grow anything. Insects and everything take over. I’m into sustainable farming.’
Harvest
The crop is harvested between late October and early November, when the moisture in the grain falls below 15 per cent. Harvesters are contracted in, helping quickly harvest the crop before, for example, rain, which can increase moisture levels in the crop.
Storage
Bellata Gold’s major selling point is that it is superior. The aim, therefore, is to ensure its durum is not mixed with inferior grains. To this end the farm has its own storage on site.
Using a computer, the grain is temperature controlled to reduce moisture content from 15 per cent to about 12 per cent. The controls allow the grain to heat up in the night and sweat, and then run air through it during the day to cool it. ‘You are just doing [the process] naturally,’ Cush says. ‘And then once we have dried it we use the cold air to drop the temperature.’
The aim is to reduce the temperature to below 20C to help break the breeding cycle of the weevil, the enemy of the grain farmer. ‘That’s not to say you can’t get insects in your grains,’ Cush says. ‘The fact is that once it starts dropping below that, they won’t breed, or their cycle becomes very slow, and then it virtually dries up at 18C…if there is anything in there the cycle just dies out.
‘And the good thing about it is that you are not using chemicals. And it is the chemicals that we believe have a detrimental affect: a lot of allergies that people suffer with today.’
Milling
Early in 2006 Bellata Gold commissioned its own special pneumatic durum mill in Tamworth. Again, this move helps guarantee its durum isn’t contaminated by inferior grains.
The process begins when the wheat is unloaded into four 250 tonne silos. They are filled with carbon dioxide. The grain sits for 10 days to kill pests without resorting to chemicals. A cleaning plant removes any impurities. Water is gradually added to increase the wheat’s moisture content to 14 per cent, and then 16 per cent.
The grain is gradually ground through five breaker rollers, producing and separating the important semolina from flour and bran.
The semolina, which is used to make pasta, is a courser grind than regular flour. Good semolina is judged by its colour, minimum bran specs and uniform granulation.
Pasta making Cush bought a second-hand Italian pasta plant, which was then refurbished over a year. One of the keys to the product’s quality is that the plant uses heat pumps to dry the pasta at a low temperature over 24 hours. This helps retain the flavour but also ensures a rich golden colour and a greater capacity to absorb sauce.
Pasta history
For a staple that is so ubiquitous, the origins of pasta are obscure. According to Roman mythology, the fire and volcano god Vulcan made a device, presumably with his forge, that made strings of dough. His forge is believed to be beneath Mount Etna in Sicily.
For early societies, pasta was easier to prepare than bread, which requires a hot oven. But it was more difficult to prepare than gruel, which was usually made from barley, and tasted bland.
The earliest record of pasta is from an Etruscan tomb from 400BC. Yet noodles date back to about 2000BC. Some sources suggest they were found near Lajia at the Huang He in western China. The yellow noodles survived in an upside-down clay pot.
Marco Polo is often incorrectly said to have introduced pasta into Italy.
What business can learn from Bellata gold
Believe in your product
It took Doug Cush more than 20 years to realise his dream of differentiating his durum wheat from the rest of the market.
Be prepared to fight for what you believe in
Cush battled the authorities who didn’t want to issue export licences for his wheat.
Think laterally and innovate
Bellata Gold redefined its durum wheat business into a pasta business. The next move could be pizza bases.
Ideas can come from anywhere
An Italian miller first suggested that Cush should make his own pasta.
Turn problems into opportunities
If a container of wheat hadn’t split on a Sydney wharf, Cush may never have begun making pasta.
Systems sell product
Cush’s dream was to turn his commodity product into a brand. By tracing the path of every grain of durum from field to the finished product, he is selling the quality of what he grows.
Iron out seasonal business wrinkles
By making pasta out of durum wheat the company smoothed out the seasonal nature of its business.
Pick retail outlets carefully
Bellata Gold is only available from the cream of food outlets. Key to its plan is avoiding mainstream supermarkets.
Reference: March 2007, volume 77:02, p. 26-30