Byron Bay Chilli Company

That same year, we bought a little, well-used taco trailer, and started selling Mexican inspired food at the local markets....which later became OzyMex, a tiny takeway in Byron Bay, still there today, at the main roundabout in Byron...

Anyway, back to the beginning at the markets, we needed to figure out what to do with about ten 200 litre drums of pickled jalapenos, so...

We made fresh salsa for our market tacos, nachos and burritos using the chillies from the garden. Soon we had a regular clientele of customers who would bring an empty jar with them...they would order tacos and ask us to fill up their jars with our salsa. Before long it dawned on us that maybe there was room for some really good salsa all over Australia, not just Byron. So we had some labels designed, and started making salsa at home. We began with three flavours… Salsa Picante, much like our current tomato salsa, Salsa Tropical… mango and pineapple based, and Salsa Verde…a traditional flavour of Mexico, made with our own home-grown tomatillos.

I can still remember hearing the groans from our young daughters, coming through the front door after their short walk home from Goonengerry Primary School. “Not more Salsa”... the aroma of chillies was a bit overpowering to them, considering our two room log cabin was pretty tiny back then...and no exhaust fan over the stove. Today, the younger one, Thea, has our spiciest Heavenly Habanero sauce on almost everything, and Johanna covets the buckets of Green Jalapeno sauce we send her to her adopted home in Germany.

Anyhow, we met a local businessman, Malcolm Dadd, who owned a gourmet bakery shop downstairs from what is now called the Balcony, in Byron Bay, called Jenny Cake. He also ran the actual bakery in one of the first industrial sheds in the Byron Industrial Park, across the street from the Council Maintenance Yard, where the cakes and cookies were made.

In addition to baked treats, he started making hommus there, and we struck a bargain. I would supervise the making of his “Tom Pure” hommus in exchange for using his kitchen and filling machine to make salsa at night. We bought a well-used, gas fired, oil jacketed cooker and installed it at Jenny Cake. Lynne and I could make about 500 jars of a night, (one cook in our 200 litre pot), then take them home to affix the labels by hand the next day.

It was about this time that we had heard about a government program called NEIS, short for New Enterprise Incentive Scheme, and decided to apply and get serious about creating a chilli sauce business. I took their one month business course in Lismore, learning about cash flow charts and all sorts of dreadful, but useful details for running a business. That decision and our subsequent association with Ian Oelrichs, and Lois Kelly at the Business Enterprise Centre in Lismore, turned out to be the spark that set our little chilli dream on fire.

We sold the taco stand to some friends, and started focussing on the salsas…selling them from a card table on the side of our old taco stand. This turned out to be a steady trade, and we thought about approaching the Brisbane market. Our first commercial customer was David Jones, at the Queen St. Mall…we simply made an appointment with their buyer, who said yes…it was that easy. Then came the Rock n’ Roll Deli in Greenslopes, I think… and we decided to try and find a distributor. Our first food show was with a potential distributor, who let me hand out samples in front of their stand at the Brisbane Showgrounds in Bowen Hills, to gauge the public response. It was there that we met Gail and Graeme Boyd, food writers for the Courier Mail, who loved our salsas. That week they wrote a feature article about the salsa, and within a few days we got a call from Bob Bartlett, Qld buyer for Coles Supermarkets. Bob asked me to come up to Brisbane for a meeting, and asked if we would be interested in trying out the salsas in a few Coles Stores.

Spring 1993...

That’s when our sales took off... first it was three stores, then five, then eight, then eighty. Then something else extraordinary happened... we were sponsored to attend NTIOC, a national trade and investment conference in Melbourne by the Lismore Business Enterprise Centre. It was there that I happened to meet Maxine McKew, who was moderating a session of speakers that included the then CEO of Woolworths, Reg Clairs. During the break, she asked me and a few other bumpkin looking blokes what we did. When we went back into the session, she asked Reg if there was anything Woolies could do to give a boost to us small time producers. He invited anyone to come up and see him after the meeting, and I was the only one to take him up on his offer. We exchanged cards and he wrote a note on the back of his card, to the Qld buyer for Woolworths. He told me to go and see him in Brisbane, when I got back to Byron. And that is how we got our big chance with Woolies...

I could go on and on, about all the experiences over the subsequent years, the travels the wins, the losses...but I don’t know if there is enough room here to do that. Today, we are still small, but not that small... we sold over two hundred tonnes of chilli sauce last year (not including the containers) and are now in about 3000 stores around Australia.

Byron Bay Chilli Sauces are also available in a number of international locations, including India, Bangladesh, Malaysia, Singapore, all over the Middle East, England and the USA.

We are very lucky to have met our General Manager, Murray Richardson, who like us was looking for a sea change, and has contributed his considerable business acumen to our little company of three... But what has really made our brand especially delicious is the love and attention to quality that Lynne has always brought to the food. That is the heart and soul of Byron Bay Chilli Company...