2008 Best Growth Business - Wise Choice Healthy Foods
In 2004 Alan Steinert and his business partner identified a potential niche market to provide the southern suburbs of Adelaide with high quality milk produced solely from Jersey cows.
This opportunity became available when a group of farmers in Myponga South Australia, established a production plant to bottle fresh milk from their own farms. Through consultation with this group, Alan and his business partner struck an agreement to provide all the distribution of this product in the Southern Adelaide Metropolitan area.
Through his personal circumstances Alan was eligible for NEIS and he joined the program through Mission Australia Adelaide, commencing training in October 2005and starting business in June 2006.
“NEIS Training, assistance and on-going mentoring has been a cornerstone of this business,” said Alan. “In particular the financial aspect of the training, including spreadsheets for sales mix and pricing were crucial as if these aspects weren’t the right mix and margins were insufficient the business wouldn’t have succeeded.”
“From that point of view, we elected to focus on ‘local’ Foodland and independent grocery stores to maintain the local flavour of South Australia which has proven to be a major part of our success.”
And success the business has had.
In the second year the business sales reached $1.7 million against a second year target of $304K.
The business employs 15 people, runs 5 delivery vans and supplies supermarkets in the NT, NSW and the ACT.