Didi Lo is the founder of Soulfresh. Soulfresh is the umbrella company to many of Australia’s leading health brands including Nutty Bruce, Lo Bros Kombucha, Pico Chocolate and so many more. Didi is on a mission to bring healthy food to the masses.
Tell us about Soulfresh.
We like to think that Soulfresh is pretty unique! We have spent all of the last 17 years with pretty much one goal, which has been to change the way people eat and drink for better. 17 years ago it was a very different place to today and there was not a lot of great food available broadly for people. You could get it in little health food stores or organic stores, there are a few little cafes serving great food, but in the main people were swilling some pretty nasty soft drinks and they were eating some pretty bad food! So, when we started Soulfresh it was all about trying to deliver these better products to people. Not these perfect amazing very left of centre products, just products that we thought the people would love to eat normally, but they have better ingredients, made with better process, and didn’t have all sorts of nasty ingredients and additives that a lot of the other food had.
So today Soulfresh is a group of 120 amazing people. We are an organisation that really thrives on its diversity. We are a challenger in the truest sense in that we really see ourselves as a business is being a platform for change. Having been able to grow over the last 17 years we are spread across Australia, New Zealand, the UK, and we are expanding into a lot of other countries now as well. What we really focus on is this change in consumer consumption. As a business we are a platform and then we have some pretty amazing brands, and those brands then really focus in an area to try and create that change.
We have Lo Bros that is directly addressing the soft drinks and the sugary drinks industry, which has done so much damage over so many years. We believe that through fermentation in products like kombucha, and more generally, we can create amazing products that tastes incredible. They’re slightly weird at the start to a mainstream consumer, but they deliver what is ultimately an amazing alternative to traditional soft drink or juice.
We’ve got Nutty Bruce, which we love! Nutty Bruce has grown to be the biggest Almond Milk in the fridge in Australia. It’s an incredible product that has four times the almond content of a lot of the competitors, it’s certified organic, it’s got clean ingredients and is made using the most incredible process where we activate the nuts.
Pico is an amazing chocolate brand centred being Organic and Fairtrade, addressing inequality and trying to tackle snacking and say you know what, we can do it better! We can make these yummy indulgent permissibly delicious products that you know taste better and just are better.
Within vegetarian we have a couple of different brands – Wildly Good and Eaty. We are trying to have a lot of fun creating these really delicious products! They were made by a chef, but you can cook them up for your family and your friends and they wouldn’t even know that you haven’t made it yourself. They are all plant based, all vegan, but they’re not aimed just at vegans. You know they are aimed at the everyday Australian who’s looking to have delicious food.
What inspired you to start Soulfresh?
I was living in Byron Bay and I was having the time of my life! I was living there with my best friends, I started off in Byron as a breakfast chef at The Pass Café – cooking breakfast getting up really early, then managed to get myself a job at cool bar that was opening called Lala land. I was making breakfast in the morning and shaking cocktails and serving drinks in the evening.
By working there I got to meet a lot of people and in winter Byron got quiet back in the day – this is like you know around the early 2000s and I’d try to drum up business and go out to a lot of the local businesses. There were a lot of great little food producers, people making chai, people making vegan plant-based pies, it was a real hive of delicious authentic good food. I really connected with it being a chef, coming from that background it just made a lot of sense. So, when I decided to get real with my life, and go to Melbourne and follow my passions I started a business selling all of the great food from Byron Bay in and around Melbourne.
So that’s how it started! When thinking about a name, a friend and I looked at different words that represented what we were trying to do and develop. We fell upon ‘soul’ and it was all about being fresh and bringing those two words together it became the genesis of the name Soulfresh.
Tell us about your career and background.
I was a naughty restless little boy who went to a series schools, I grew up in Canberra, I went to school there, I did a stint at Bathurst at a co-ed boarding school which was quite an experience, but after a few years I went back to Canberra to try to finish school. I didn’t end up finishing it, it didn’t feel right for me, so I dropped out and I started travelling around Victoria and Tasmania picking fruit. From there did a season at the snow as a kitchen hand and that’s where I was introduced to being in a kitchen which I loved! I loved the lifestyle, the freedom, the food and it was a great way to be able to then explore while earning an income.
I spent 10-12 years progressing through kitchens. First being a dish pig, then helping with salads, then getting onto the pans, and then getting to the point where I was writing the menus at a variety different places. So that’s where I really started!
Describe a typical work day for you (if there is such a thing).
It’s funny, because having just been in COVID lockdown what a typical day looked like for me has been very different to what it say looked like in the years prior!
Yes, because of COVID, and yes because of staying at home, but mainly it was about being in Australia. For much of the last 5 years, I’ve spent a quarter of the year or more travelling. A lot of that travel is for food shows, a lot is overseas setting up businesses and preparing businesses, meeting with retailers and just really sort of exploring food.
What a typical day looks like for me pre COVID was working hard – starting early and trying to spend time with the family and see my beautiful boy and my partner and then go to work in the office. Then once I’ve finished work around 8-9pm I head home to have a quick dinner and then get back into work again working till about midnight or a bit later.
So I’ve been super hectic, weaving through the travel which would be happening regularly as well. But during COVID it’s been amazing because it’s this new reality that you can be away from the office more and I actually can be more productive, and I’m able to do more. So what is work going to look like? It’s going to look like probably working just as hard – but a mix of being at home more with the family and at work… and obviously no international travel for a little while yet.
Has COVID-19 affected your business? How are you navigating that?
Well, I don’t know that COVID-19 has not affected any business and it has certainly impacted Soulfresh. And by impacted, I don’t necessarily mean it’s been terrible, but it has been super tough.
Going into COVID felt like Armageddon in that you don’t know what’s going to happen, but it was looking pretty bad, so as a business we had to work very quickly. We’ve got businesses across a number of different countries, and they were all being impacted, but to different extent. Within the business we have certain channels that have been decimated like the cafe channels where people really just had to stop going out. Whereas other channels like grocery have really benefited with so many more people eating at home and cooking at home, and they are buying more groceries.
Through all of that you have the difficulty of obviously trying to manage staff, trying to manage the downside and make sure everyone’s ok. Then also dealing with stock and products. When products sell more than you’d expect it can be almost a bigger problem than when products don’t sell to what you expect. You’re trying to deal with overstock deals and out-of-stocks and understocks.
It’s been a stressful time, but I think a real positive for us like other businesses, is we’ve been able to be quite introspective during this time. We’ve done so much work and thinking about who we are, what we can do, what we doing well and what we doing badly. There’s that saying that ‘growth hides your sins’ and I think it was probably true at Soulfresh, and so having this time to really sit back and reflect on what’s important and who we want to be and how we want to structure the business has been incredible for us. I feel like we’re in a better place now coming out of COVID than we’ve ever been in the history of Soulfresh.
What advice do you have for those wanting to start a business?
Do it. I think there is so much good that comes from saying yes, and there is so much good that comes from being ignorant and starry-eyed. By that I don’t mean just go and start a business no matter what, of course you have to considered. You of course have to understand the opportunity, you of course have to understand your own capabilities, and potentially whether you can make it work financially. All of these things you need to do, but I think in reality for most people who start a business how you think is going to be is completely different to how it actually is.
For years Soulfresh was super tough, we never made any money, we could never afford to pay ourselves a wage. I think it really does give you grit and determination and an ability to persevere. What I really realised through that process is that it really comes down to how hard and how much you want it, how hard are you prepared to work, and how much hustle you have. I don’t think hustle can be understated because it is so important to be able to hustle, to be able to make things happen.
If you say no, you’re never, ever going to do things. Saying yes is the first step. It’s like go for it. Be OK with making mistakes. Trust yourself. Know what you want to do as much as possible, but don’t be afraid and don’t be upset if that planned changes because it’s definitely going to.
What’s next for you, and Soulfresh?
Now we’re at a really exciting time at Soulfresh. We spent the first 17 years working out who we were and what we could do that could be really unique and different. We’ve really refined what we do.
The same vision today stands as stood 17 years ago, which is – we very genuinely want to be a platform for change. We very genuinely want to be able to create these better alternatives that appeal to everyday people and deliver them something that feels familiar something that is better and is very authentic.
We are really excited because we’re in a huge expansion phase, so we are really ramping up a whole European team in multiple markets, we are ramping up what we are doing in New Zealand, we are really building up the team capabilities in Australia. We have a super exciting next 3 years planned out and it’s really going to be focusing on our core brands and core categories.
It’s so exciting because we have so many great plans around how we genuinely think we’re going to change the soft drinks industry, how we think we’re going to challenge the dairy industry, how we are generally going to provide better sustainable options. How we think we can take consumers away to a more sustainable protein other than just meat proteins. We are an inclusive business, we don’t believe in scaring people in to change, we believe in exciting people into change. That means giving people products that taste incredible and amazing at a price point that they can access, and they can re-buy.
That’s really where we’re focused and we are doing some really exciting launches, so we’ve just launched All Mighty Bruce Future M*lk which was our vision for how we think milk should be in the future. It gives you all of the protein and calcium you need, but it’s from whole plant ingredients. It’s milky, it’s creamy, it’s delicious and it’s wholesome. So whether it’s all the amino acids or the protein or the calcium, there is now no sacrifice. We’re really proud of products like that and we’ve got a lot more in the pipelines!
