WHEN it comes to lateral thinking, farmers pretty well set the pace in Australian industry.
You can go way back to the stump jump plough and the innovation process from people on the land has never slowed down.
Moulamein farmer Liz Kaylock is yet another one of those individuals who are handed a problem and it’s their job to find a solution – preferably by lunchtime so they aren’t getting nagged by dinner on how the job is going.
Based on a broadacre cropping and livestock farm, Liz and her family had also diversified into a commercial stone fruit orchard.
Her husband Peter, a little frustrated by the volatile prices, asked Liz what she could come up with to value add to the fruit for a better return to the orchard.
Well, talk about thinking on your feet – Liz had the problem solved by morning smoko.
She was going to make fruit leather strips.
“I had actually been making them for our kids when they were at primary school,” Liz says.
“I already had the dehydrator, and I knew fruit leather in the roll-up form would be just too bulky for fitting into handbags and office drawers, so I decided to flatpack them and improve their appearance,” Liz explains.
The idea seems to have worked wonders for IKEA, so why not for Liz’s newly branded Fruitilizcious?
They had certainly proved a hit, not just with her children but with most of the local primary school kids and professional adults, whenever they could get their hands on them.
So Liz went into the flatpack fruit business, becoming a regular at the Swan Hill Farmers Market and spreading her wares to a few local shops and tourism outlets, such as Boo’s Cafe and Providore and Boo’s Lakeside (Swan Hill), The Modern Butcher (Swan Hill), The Deniliquin Information Centre, The Workshop Cafe (Gunbower), Mildura Farms (Red Cliffs) and the Moulamein Art Gallery – as well as sites in places including Koondrook, Barham, Echuca and Hay.
And her husband, who was a director of the Moulamein Grain Co-op while she was spreading her fruity message, decided as she was ricocheting around the region delivering her fruit strips, she could double up and fill the boot of her car with Moulamein Oats boxes at the same time.
With all that, plus a thriving little online market developing, with assorted flavours flying as far afield as Queensland and the Northern Territory, it wasn’t going too badly for a little boutique business built on an orchard that no longer existed.
Two years ago, the Kaylocks’ orchard was repurposed back into cropping land.
This left Liz with a conundrum – and if you thought Liz was hands-on with the product before, it was now moving to a whole new level.
Including having to find access to local growers to supplement what she had left in the home garden – a few apricot, pear and apple trees and a blood plum. Along with grandma’s 80-year-old mulberry tree.
But she was marketing much more than that.
“In our mixed flavours we have blood plum-apple and nectarine-pear, strawberry-apple and peach-pear, boysenberry-pear and nectarine-apple, mulberry-apple with peach-pear, fig-apple-ginger and peach-pear,” Liz says.
“While the pure flavours we have are apricot, apricot and pear, nectarine and pear and nectarine and peach – as well as dried apple slices cinnamon dusted or dipped in orange juice.”
She says the jam market was already well and truly cornered by farmers with too much fruit, but fruit leather was an untouched niche on the local farmers’ market circuit.
It is a nutritious snack containing no added sugars, no dyes to enhance the colours and no preservatives – making it a great option for health-conscious customers, looking for a natural, minimally processed product.
“To work on the larger scale I had to do a bit of R&D to work out if the product was best done raw or cooked – and if cooked, how to not lose any vitamins or roughage, which makes it such a nutritious snack,” Liz added.
“If something needs to be sweetened a little, I add in pear.
“Not only does it sweeten the end product, it also helps give it a very appealing gloss and softness.
“When you work with something like the strawberries, which have a high water content, I tend to add in some apple to stabilise it and give it a more body.
“In the end, the best product was partly cooked then pureed, before spreading on to special plastic sheets that fit in the dehydrating trays.
“Once packaged into the cellophane bags, they have a best-buy date put on them, in most cases they would be good for another six months – although they may get a little darker in colour and a little tougher to eat.”
Liz says the cellophane wrap lets people see what they are buying, especially as most of the fruit colours are enhanced by the drying process.
She also says the process maximises the intensity of some of the flavours, especially the mulberry, which Liz describes as “spectacular”.
But it’s not all work and no play, Liz certainly knows how to get a rise out of people.
“I have been able to pull a few jokes on people after I come back inside coated in blood red mulberry juice – asking for them to help me stop the bleeding,” she says with a laugh.
Recently Liz has not been looking to expand, happy to service the outlets she has because, as she puts it, while she is happy to dabble, there are plenty of other things to deal with on the family property.
For more information on Fruitilizcious products, email Liz at fruitilizcious@gmail.com
