137. A Transforming Military Industrial Complex

With Rob Pekin & Uncle Kel O’Neill at Food Connect

Robert Pekin is the CEO & co-founder of Food Connect, the self-described ‘systems enterprise’ in Brisbane. You might remember Rob from episode 28 with his brilliant partner Emma-Kate Rose, when we talked at length about their back-story and their soon to be successful $2m equity crowd fund. And from episode 88 last year, with Kungalu and Birri-Gubba Woman Gaala Watson, on an imminent native grains - and milling - breakthrough, and a transformation in governance led by First Nations.

When I was in Brisbane for Convergence recently, I dropped in for an update. Rob walked me around this old industrial property as it further transforms into Australia’s first multi-function Food Hub, now hosting over 40 enterprises - each outstanding stories in their own right.

“We’ve just got the development application conditionally approved, so now we can open up the 350-people event space, all of the cafe, bakery, shop, bars, all that stuff. We’re starting to raise funds for that, and build. Yeah, the industrial area’s going to get a bit of a transformation. ”

— Rob Pekin

This was a quick visit. I’d just recorded with mutual friend Amanda Cahill for what became episode 134, and cycled up to the Shed for a look and some lunch together. I wasn’t going to record this, but as I was being blown away all over again by Rob, alongside Chair of the Food Connect Foundation, Wiradjuri man from Dubbo NSW, Uncle Kel O’Neil, I had to pull out the recorder and share some of it with you.

So join us at the Shed, for the conclusion to our Queensland series, and more beginnings for Food Connect.

This conversation was recorded on 14 July 2022.

Click on the photos below for full view, and hover over them for descriptions (pics by Anthony James unless noted).

Please note this transcript isn’t perfect, but hopefully serves to provide greater access to these conversations for those who need or like to read.
SPEAKERS
Anthony James (host), Robert Pekin, Uncle Kel O’Neill

Anthony 00:00
You're with The RegenNarration, exploring how communities are changing the systems and stories we live by. This is independent media, free of ads and freely available thanks to the support of listeners like you. So a special thanks this week to Martin Van der Walt and Gillian Sanbrook for becoming treasured subscribers. Thanks for your great chat too Martin, and Gillian for committing to a year's subscription. If you too sense something worthwhile in all this, please consider joining Martin and Gillian and a great community of supporting listeners with as little as $3 a month or whatever amount you can and want to contribute. You can get all sorts of benefits, including of course continuing to receive the podcast now with transcripts every week. Just head to the website via the show notes RegenNarration.com/support. Thanks a lot.

Anthony 01:01
G'day, my name's Anthony James, this is The RegenNarration, and that was Robert Pekin, the CEO and co founder of Food Connect, the self described systems enterprise in Brisbane. You might remember Rob from Episode 28 with his brilliant partner Emma-Kate Rose, when we talked at length about their backstory, and their soon to be successful $2 million equity crowd fund. And from Episode 88 last year with Kungalu and Birri-Gubba woman, Gaala Watson, on an imminent native grains - and milling - breakthrough, and a transformation in governance led by First Nations. Well, when I was in Brisbane for Convergence recently, I dropped in to say G'day, Rob walked me around this old industrial property as it further transforms into Australia's first multifunction food hub, now hosting over 40 enterprises, each outstanding stories in their own right. This was just a quick visit, I'd just recorded with mutual friend Amanda Cahill for what became episode 134 and cycled up to the shed for a look and some lunch together. I wasn't gonna record this either. But as I was being blown away all over again, this time by Rob, alongside Chair of the food connect foundation Wiradjuri man from Dubbo New South Wales, Uncle Kel O'Neil, I had to pull out the recorder and share it with you. I've recorded this spatially too. So you'll hear Rob and Kel as they were standing around me. I hope you enjoy that effect. So join us at the shed for the conclusion to Queensland series, and more beginnings for food Connect. Let's start at the brewery, shall we? First up, here's Rob.

Rob 02:55
It's really exciting to sort of see what's happening like we're putting in a mezzanine here. Because the Brewer has got much bigger. So this you can see here. Just come up here. But he's run out of room. So we're now renting him all that space across the other side there to fit in.

Anthony 03:14
What's this Brewery called?

Rob 03:15
This is called Bunker Brewery. Because this is all World War Two.

Anthony 03:19
This infrastructure? I remember you saying that.

Rob 03:21
This infrastructure's all World War Two, yeah.
Anthony 03:21
I thought of that when you were just telling me back at the mill there, which we'll probably go back to, about the Spitfire flour, I thought that .... yeah.

Rob 03:33
Oh, I hadn't put that together ... Perfect. Yeah, so now this is all old style farmhouse brewing. And each barrel is just secondhand fruit mixed with beer, mixed with wine, mixed with everything and fermented in oak barrels. So it's fermented in these tanks, and then aged. But he's always experimenting, and there's always people brewers here. Different brewers from your normal brewers. These are all farmhouse funk brewers. So they're always over here pulling nails. They have this thing called pulling nails. Each oak barrel has a stainless steel nail in it, where they pull the nail out with a pair of pliers, put the glass underneath and they're always saying, Oh, hey, this is six months, eight months, nine months, 24 months down the track, they're sort of getting a sense of is this the product they want? It's very experimental. Don't need refrigeration. So as long as it's kept below 20 degrees, it's good. Good, good to go.

Anthony 04:27
I was just - I mean, the reason why we had to pull this recorder out is because I was just taking a moment here of what you sorted like every day, but coming into this shed again, four years on - from last time I was here - the time of the equity crowdfund. And here, the whole shed is up and going and you've just said there are 41 tenants now - there were 30 the last time we spoke a couple of months ago.

Rob 04:47
I know, it's so long ago. We had a few tenants graduate who had a lot of time in the kitchen. And so we sort of in four weeks, put on nine new tenants in the kitchen and one of them I was just talking about - they're our oldest entrepreneurs, they're in their 70s, Cassie and Brae, they're sisters. And they're doing a pet treat business, sugar free, preservative free, all that sort of stuff. And they've been experimenting and researching market research for years and years. And they are just lovely, lovely people. And this was their first day in the kitchen today making this product. And, you know, the excitement, because they didn't know what the food connect shed was all about until they come here and did their initial tour maybe three or four weeks ago. And I told them the whole story. And they went, Oh, my God, you know, this is this is where we got to be, you know, this is our space. Yeah, so it was great to just go over there and introduce uncle Kel to them.

Anthony 05:40
G'day Uncle Kel

Uncle Kel 05:44
Howdi!
Anthony 05:44
You got another story. We'll spend another day on that one!

Rob 05:46
Yeah. So do you want to go back to the mill?

Anthony 05:49
Let's do that. And you know, that's the moment to keep Uncle Kel in the conversation too, because you're working on the mill as well. And you've been pivotal to getting the money in to get it as well.

Uncle Kel 05:58
Well, yeah, it was a bit of a struggle late nights thinking out how we're gonna do it. It's one thing to say, oh, we should buy a mill and start milling flour. But, you know, well, if we get it, what do we actually do?

Anthony 06:11
And here it is. So we're looking at it. And I'll put some photos on the website whenever this gets up, but the smell of the flour around it. And you were saying that it's actually outperforming the Vermont mill.

Rob 06:22
That's right. Yeah, the new American stone mill, which was not the intention at all, we were just wanting to - when I commissioned it from Hamish and Ian from Woodstock. I just said steel and stone. Because we're in a subtropical climate, we don't want timber - we don't want anything that gathers moisture. So they went about, you know, finding a quarry, where we could get Australian granite because all the granite was coming in from either Italy or America, which is bizarre, or this, that what they call it? Stone constructed like they do kitchen benches these days. You know, it's actually made out of a composite composite.

Anthony 07:00
But the granite was there.

Rob 07:01
The granite was there. Yeah, a little quarry near Castlemaine, near Bendigo. Somewhere around there. And it is really performing super well. We've had you know, obviously we've been sending samples to all the other flour mills in Australia. And they've been going wow, you know, is this sifted? No, not sifted at all. Just straight, you know, one pass through the mill. Yeah. So pretty exciting.

Anthony 07:24
And faster too?

Rob 07:25
And faster. Yeah. And so far, obviously, we're doing a lot of trialing in the summertime where it was quite hot. So we're really keen. We're currently designing the room that's going to go in, and that room will be cooled. And obviously airtight and all all the other stuff that we you know, we've been visiting - Kel's been visiting a lot of millers and bakers. And so have Emma and I, and we think we've arrived at the point where we know what to do without a lot of cost.

Anthony 07:55
And so the area we're in now you're about to do the half a million dollar retrofit?

Rob 07:58
Yeah, refit to the public facing - we've just got the development application conditionally approved. So now we can open up the 350 people event space, all of the cafe bakery shop, bars, you know, all that stuff. It's just to start to raise funds for that. And build. And Jeff's over there. There's about eight architects as careholders. So three of them have been co designing the look and the feel and interior design, the flow and you know, how it all works and how to reuse all the bits and pieces we've, we've dragged down off different places. And all the different timbers. You can see a pile of timbers over there. They're quite long. They were rescued from a floor over in the other office, which we'll go over to in a minute. Brilliant. So they're going to line parts of it, and we're going to build our own doors. So each bay here will have a door that swings out and form an awning and opens up onto the park over across the road. So yeah the industrial area is going to get a bit of a transformation. Yeah. So we'll keep going around to Food Connect and check that out too.

Anthony 08:22
And those indigenous programs you were talking about with the mill, getting young staff in, is that happening or looking to happen?

Rob 09:26
Yeah, that's certainly happening. We're now building partnerships with obviously Black Duck with Jacob Burch who's up at the Sunshine Coast. He's a Gamilaroi fella who's working with mob out on country. So out around St. George. Yeah, Kel's been out there to the farm where we got the Mitchell grass from.

Uncle Kel 09:48
Yeah pretty amazing, actually.

Anthony 09:49
What's its First Nations name again?

Rob 09:52
Gammalay yeah, so they call it gammalay. I think some people call it dancing grass. Yeah. Some people call it weeping grass. But I think if we stick to the First Nations terms for it, that'll be much better.

Anthony 10:07
I think so, for many reasons.

Rob 10:11
Kel, you were gonna say something?

Uncle Kel 10:12
I was just gonna say when you go out to, we went on to a property, the farmer there has been actually growing the Mitchell grass as stock for his sheep. So he uses it as a sheep feed. And he said it's awesome. He said it will, it just grows and grows and grows, if there's a spare bit of dirt, it'll grow on it. The sheep love it. And it doesn't need any rain. It's got all those advantages of a native grain. It's just absolutely amazing. And then he thought, oh, maybe I can use it to mill it to use it as a grain. That's a long journey. You know, no one actually knows how to do it. And because the grain size is so small, it's a very interesting process.

Anthony 10:50
Yeah, some of the challenge. Reconstruct old knowledge.

Rob 10:54
Yeah. Well, Bruce Pascoe, he's now got this machine he imported from Western Australia, that's used in regeneration of Bush. And they've wound it up, because that's been the hardest trick, how do you aspirate the grain from the florette? To make it easy to mill. So we've been doing everything. We've been burning the grain, we've been floating, floating the grain, we've been doing everything, because the old people would have had their way of doing it. Because it's a highly nutritious, beautiful aroma, especially when it's been burned after. Yeah. So that's been all led by Jacob Burch. He's been thinking and experimenting at home, and then he comes down to the shed. And he says, right, we're gonna do this on a larger scale. And we have failures. We have successes.

Anthony 11:03
What an enormous process though. Yeah, recovering so much more than just that process.

Rob 11:47
Yeah. It's a whole - Because obviously, the country needs these grains. The country needs these to heal. And we need them ourselves. We can't rely on these sort of monocultures of grains.

Anthony 12:00
And you're piecing together identity as it happens at the same time.

Rob 12:04
Yeah, that's right. And then the final thing that we've got overlay on it, which I know Bruce and I spoke about, probably seven years ago, when we were talking about how do we give white farmers the opportunity to be a part of the story, but without exploiting the grain and exploiting that knowledge. So we've got some ideas we're talking about. Because obviously, we need to have this at scale. So the price can come down and can be a part of our diet. Yeah. So yeah, so there's a lot more work to be done yet on that space.

Uncle Kel 12:42
And it's interesting, too, because the University of NSW have got a research farm at Narrabri. They've got a whole native grains program. It's a project within the University of New South Wales and their grains. There's tentacles everywhere.

Anthony 12:56
It's coming on.

Rob 12:57
Yeah.

Uncle Kel 12:58
Yes.

Rob 12:59
So you're in the - the music in the background is the food connect packing room. They just finished packing but they're doing the end of week stock take, coz this is the last day, we only work four days a week. Food Connect - Monday to Friday operation.

Anthony 13:15
Beautiful. Smells good in here too, by the way.

Rob 13:18
Yeah, I don't know what that smell is! You probably haven't seen these offices in their regenerated state

Anthony 13:26
No, in fact I didn't see this room at all.

Rob 13:28
These were very, very rundown buildings. And we come up with this formula of using 20 mil ply, because we can reuse it. So that's the only wall in the whole building that's actually been plastered, but we pulled all the false ceilings out got rid of all of where there was a bit of asbestos. Fortunately, there wasn't a lot of. And created these really warm, warm in terms of how they feel, also warm because the heater is on - spaces where people can feel just much more relaxed and they're not in officey type environment with flouro's and everything else. So it's coming along really well without losing its sort of charm and feel. Now what I'm gonna do is we're gonna get over to Emma. Because they close at 1.30. So let's shut it down. We might jump in the back of Kel's car and get him to take us over.

Anthony 13:31
Beauty. Let's go.

Anthony 14:27
That was Rob Pekin and Uncle Kel O'Neill at the magnificent systems enterprise Food Connect. For more on these blokes, food connect, and my previous conversations on the podcast with Rob, Emma Kate Rose and Gaala Watson, see the links in our program details. You can also find a selection of photos on the episode webpage. And that's with thanks as always to the generous supporters who've helped make this episode possible. If you're enjoying what you hear, please consider joining this community of supporting listeners. So I can keep the podcast going. Just head to the website via the show notes RegenNarration.com/support. Thanks again. And if you feel like it, share this episode with someone you know who you think might like it. The music you're hearing is Regeneration by Amelia Barden off the Regenerating Australia soundtrack. My name is Anthony James. Thanks for listening.