We started out baking oats, nuts and seeds in our kitchen at home, burning a few batches along the way, to come up with five delicious flavours of muesli and granola (which we like to think of as crunchy muesli). We were excited to have people taste our experiments, so we started selling our muesli at farmers’ markets. Which turns out to be a brilliant place to be if you want to know what your cus
tomers think. Being small – it was just the two of us, Sally and Scott – meant that we could respond to what people were saying, tweaking the recipes and adding a little less cinnamon here, a bit more fruit there and even adding chocolate to the mix. (A daring move, we thought at the time, but nutritionally sound and tastes great.) It also meant we could trial our packaging, our sales pitch and so much more. Some of our customers from these early days are still buying Farmer Jo muesli and many customers became friends. When we started out, Scott was working in the boutique, hand-roasted coffee business in inner-city Sydney and Sally was in interior design. With the arrival of our first daughter, Olivia, we started to talk about the kind of future we wanted – and it didn’t involve working long hours for somebody else. The future we saw burning bright was one where we worked together and for ourselves. We knew we had complementary skills. Sally as creator and nurturer of the brand and Scott doing what he does best, talking to people. Before we hit on muesli as our thing, we’d already worked through a few other ideas, from organic cleaning products to wool throws, and even then it took a really long time before we took any action. (A pretty intense late-night argument at the kitchen table was involved.) The inspiration came from what was happening in Sydney at the time – the emergence of small, hands-on, artisan food companies that gave a toss about quality, value, health and ethics. All around us we could see guys roasting coffee beans in garages, baking small batch sourdough bread and grinding bean-to-bar chocolate. Was there room, we wondered, for a boutique, small batch, handmade muesli brand too? To take all that was great about muesli – basically, it’s incredible health and nutritional benefits – and add some bling. We wanted to make a muesli that would have you salsa dancing to the breakfast table wearing flowers in your hair. It turns out there was room in the market for a boutique, small batch, handmade muesli brand. A decade on, with a range of 15 muesli and granola flavours, including gluten free and paleo mixes, and a strong team, which includes Sally’s sister Michelle and her husband Eliseo (Yeah!) ¬working alongside us. Farmer Jo is now sold around Australia and exports to Japan and elsewhere in Asia. A few years ago, our business started to sound like corn when it’s popping. Orders were growing, the production kitchen was working at full throttle and we were taking on more people. While we loved our city base, we’d also started dreaming of having more space ¬¬– we have four daughters now, Olivia, Frankie, May and Bella, and our inner-city workers’ cottage was feeling very snug. We wanted to live life in the slow lane and fall asleep to the soundtrack of the ocean IRL. It felt like a big decision, but after a bit of juggling and planning we did it. We moved to northern NSW, building a production kitchen in the sleepy town of Mullumbimby, near to Byron Bay, and found a home with ocean views for us. The real win has been the life that we’ve created for our family. We work hard and, like every other business owner, our minds are always occupied with one thing or another to do with Farmer Jo – a new flavour, sales campaigns, converting to recyclable packaging, establishing new markets … The list is endless. But, we also have time to hang out with our kids and our families so that we can celebrate the great stuff in life, get to the gym and yoga classes as often as we can, walk on the beach, eat and drink well and laugh. (We do a lot of that.) Thank you for being interested in our story. We’re pretty proud of what we do and really appreciate all our customers for backing us.
—Sally and Scott Tulloch
