Meet Our Makers: Fiona Whatley of Springhill Farm

Fiona Whatley is the General Manager at Springhill Farm, the multifaceted food business creating Aussie farmhouse-inspired vegan & gluten free snacks.

Proudly second-generation family owned and run, Springhill Farm’s SLICE and boodles brands provide a modern twist on Aussie farmhouse kitchen-inspired snacks.

The range has grown from classic slices to special-occasion treats, healthy vegan snacks, yummy gluten free bites, and now delightfully crispy clusters with everyday snack brand boodles. 

C&C: Hi Fiona! Can you tell us about the early days of Springhill Farm - how did it start and where did the idea come from?

Fiona: My Mum Jo started Springhill Farm over 35 years ago. It all began because school kids would regularly visit my parents’ farm. They would have a full ‘farm experience’ day out - think collecting eggs, hay bale rides and watching the sheep shearing. 

At the end of the day, Jo would make a muesli slice and they would eat them on the hay bales. This was really a way to introduce these kids (who were usually from the city) to how things are made - the wheat gets grown in the paddock, is milled into flour and that’s how we make the food. So it was a really early ‘paddock to plate’ concept back in the 80s and was featured in Vogue at the time as a new wave of snacking. It sounds foreign now but muesli bars didn’t really exist in the 80s and it was quite a new concept. This evolved because the kids loved the product, but their parents (who would accompany the kids on their farm visit) really loved the product as well. They asked where to buy it, so Ray and Jo started a baking arm of Springhill Farm and started supplying into health food stores and supplying that more alternative farmer’s market style product market. From there, the business started to grow and Springhill Farm shifted its focus so that the baking arm of the business became more of the focus. 

We decided to build our own factory in Ballarat in 2008, 16 years ago now. James (my husband) and I both went off and had different careers before we began to take over Springhill Farm when my parents were transitioning out of the business. We set it up for growth and put our own stamp on the business. Since then, the business has grown significantly - we have our two brands, SLICE and boodles - and we also do a lot of co-manufacturing for a lot of other brands as well. We now have around 60-80 people onsite, we run 5 days a week and we’re BRC Accredited (which is an international food standard). We’ve come a long way! 

C&C: Amazing. We’d love to talk a bit about the SLICE and boodles products and your Australia-first sourcing policy for your ingredients. Can you tell us a bit about prioritising local ingredients in a business like yours?

Fiona: Where we can, we will always source from Australian suppliers and producers - that is always our number one option. One of the challenges with sourcing ingredients is that they’re not always grown in Australia. Coconut, for example, isn’t grown in Australia at the quantity that we need. 

With our BRC accreditation, we’re required to buy from other GFSI certified suppliers for the most part. That does mean that it can limit the amount of people that you can buy from, but any mainstream supplier will usually tick off a GFSI. 

C&C: It seems that another important part of the business and these brands are the great partnerships that you have with brands like Virgin, Qantas and Red Cross Lifeblood. Have you found new audiences through these partnerships and how have they made an impact on your business?

Fiona: For us, relationships are always key. As in anything in life, if you have a great relationship built on trust around delivering what people need in time and at quality then that goes a long way to building your relationship. We also try to partner with brands that are aligned to us. Take Lifeblood or Qantas for example - they’re well known Australian brands that we’re really proud to be associated with. 

Our relationships give us volume and great brand exposure. When you’re manufacturing your own product, a manufacturing site has to be busy. When machinery isn’t running, it’s sitting there costing money. So you want to align yourself with brands that do provide that exposure through volume. From a brand point of view, getting food into people’s mouths is always our best form of marketing. You can pop something on the shelf, but giving something to someone for free is a wonderful way for people to experience your product for the first time. 

When you’re sitting on a plane, you’re more likely to over analyse the packaging that you’re giving. I don’t think there’s a more captive moment for people than when they’re stuck in their seat and they’re looking at your product. If you can make that a really positive experience, then that’s a massive win. 

We also supply people like Accor and do some great loyalty gifts for them, so people that are in a hotel room get a box of our mixed slices - they’re more likely to look at them because they’re in a hotel room. We’re always looking for these opportunities where we can be aligning with our target audience and promoting our product in ways that are separate to just price promotion. This drives an element of brand awareness, but it’s not necessarily driving brand loyalty. 

C&C: Speaking of that target audience, both SLICE and boodles seem to sit at an intersection where they’re mostly plant based and gluten free and cater to lots of different audiences, but they also taste great and keep a real element of nostalgia which people love. Is catering to a wide-ranging audience something that’s important to your business? 

Fiona: It’s something that we have really worked hard to define and refine over the years. Initially, you think you want to sell to everyone and what you learn over time is that actually, if you’re trying to be something to everyone you’re nothing to anyone. That doesn’t mean that you can’t appeal to everyone when they pick up your product, but in terms of who we are targeting, we’re very much targeting women around the 30-45 year old age bracket. 

We’re plant-based and will always be all natural, so you’re never going to find any numbers in the ingredients list of our products, but we’re not necessarily ‘healthy’ when it comes to low-fat, low-sugar and those sorts of things. For us, our philosophy is very much one of balance. We still believe that you can have your treat, focussing on people that are trying to be ‘healthier’ but still enjoy a treat.

C&C: A great philosophy! So boodles is your newer brand, how did the opportunity to create boodles come about?

Fiona: About three years ago, we recognised that we wanted to build our own brand more. We saw some opportunities to bring some real innovation into some new spaces. We looked at the worldwide trends and what the insights into these trends are. So applying that to boodles for example, the insight with boodles is that everyone loves to treat themselves, but no one likes the guilt. As we all know at the moment, sugar is a really key driver of guilt and so producing a product that is fifty percent less sugar means that you’re offsetting the guilt associated with the product and therefore your driving permissibility which drives purchase. When we unpacked this a little bit more, we wondered what this could look like from a product point of view.  

The boodles are made of puffed ancient seeds and grains, meaning that they’re really light and crispy and a lot of people will talk about how it reminds them of a chocolate crackle and their childhood. We wanted the product to bring in that nostalgia element - the number one compliment that we can hear from people is ‘this tastes just like what my Grandma used to make’. These childhood memories that people talk about when people try our product are what we absolutely love to hear. In the 1980s, chocolate crackles were full of hydrogenated vegetable fat and things like that, so we’re not including things like this now but we’re still being inspired by that nostalgia and using a plant-based chocolate to bring it all together. 

C&C:  How has the process of getting these products ‘on the shelf’ been?

Fiona: So, another interesting thing with boodles is that if you read the packaging, you’ll see that the chocolate is plant-based. But we don’t talk about plant-based chocolate with boodles - first of all, we were putting boodles into a confectionery category, which at the time had no ‘better for you’ confectionery options. Healthy confectionery is a bit of a mind shift for people and it can be difficult to get people to head down that aisle and look for a ‘better for you’ option. Then we were also saying that boodles is fifty percent less sugar and asking test groups how they felt about the product being plant-based. Those that knew plant-based options said that it was amazing, but because the product is sitting in a mainstream aisle, we needed to make sure that we were appealing to the masses as well. The test group had a really strong response, communicating that they liked the sugar reduction, but a plant-based option was a slight step too far for them at this point. So from a strategy point of view (now that the products have been on the market for eighteen months and millions of people have tried them), we will start to introduce the plant-based messaging because they now know that the product tastes great and will go back and buy them once they’ve tried them.  Again, it was about getting the ‘food in mouth’ and proving to people that you can have a better for you chocolate confectionery that is also plant-based and tastes amazing, which was a big part of boodles’ brand evolution.

C&C: In that process of getting the products ready for the shelf, why did you choose to work with Cartel & Co? What were you looking for in a distributor? 

Fiona: Part of our overall business strategy was to develop products that are more retail-focussed. SLICE has historically been very much a foodservice brand. As we decided to develop more retail-focussed brands, we needed to flesh out how to get those products out there. We’d dabbled in doing our slices in retail, but we’d never really developed products specifically for retail (we’d kind of ‘retrofitted’ them back into retail in the past). Also, boodles had an added complication with its chocolate (because it will melt!) and to ship temperature-controlled cartons for single cartons was too hard to do on our own.  

So we went to our customers that we’d been supplying for a long time and asked them which distributor they would recommend, if we were going to use one. Overwhelmingly, they all came back with Cartel & Co. Talking to the people that we knew would give us a truthful answer was the best way for us to think through who we should go with. We then reached out to Hayssam and had a few conversations regarding what that might look like, signed the agreement and now Cartel & Co are our exclusive distributor into independent retail in the east coast of Australia. 

Going back to what I said right at the start of this chat, relationships are really important and we’d really rather lock in one key distributor in the space if we can and work really hard with them to grow and develop. It’s better for the distributor and it’s better for us, so when we find someone that we can align with then we’re all in.

C&C: That’s great news. Before we sign off, if I was brand new to the Springhill Farm world, which SLICE and boodles product of yours would you recommend that I try first?

Fiona: For boodles, it would be the Peanut & Pretzel flavour - and it’s funny, we have display stands for boodles and the shelf that has the Peanut & Pretzel flavour on it is always empty. For SLICE, the Passionfruit & Lime is new this year and it’s my number one choice now. It’s got passionfruit seeds, passionfruit powder and beautiful lime oil - it’s my go to at the moment!

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