Our Heritage - Simply Edible Flowers is Feeding The World With Flowers ®
Hello Flower Foodies!!
Mum and I are so excited to share the story of Simply Edible Flowers with you!! Our flower-farming heritage spans nearly 40 years and 3 generations!. It's a bit of a long story and I do love to share so don't say that I didn't warn you... ;-)
My amazing Mum started her first commercial flower farm in the early 80's and it wasn't long before I was "chief receptionist" on the farm at the wise old age of 5 (at least I thought I was)!
Obviously my entrepreneurial spirit (code for a desire to buy saddlery for my pony) kicked in pretty early and no-one was spared my sales attempts. My primary school friends were sold lace bags that I stitched for presents for their grandmas and my biggest money making endeavour involved "drying" rose petals in the microwave for the House and Garden stores. $50 per bag for a 10 year in the 80's felt like I'd won the lottery! Hard lessons were learnt of course when all the rose petals went mouldy and I lost my contract!
So jump ahead a couple of decades for all of us that included relocations, university, marriage, divorce, family passings... to 2004 when Mum and I started the first rose petal farm in the southern hemisphere. It's been a tremendous journey at Simply Rose Petals. One filled with many adventures and awards. Over 10 Australian Bridal Industry Awards and the Veuve Clicquot New Generation Award for an Australian businesswoman under 40.
In the last decade we've enjoyed ourselves immensely but there's always been a little something missing. A feeling that we're not really doing enough. To get to this place in business, you have to have had a lot of support and help. Were we doing enough? Were we giving back enough?
A few years ago I had the great privilege of volunteering at Kings Cross with the Australian Rural Leadership Program. As one of the most notorious crime hotspots in Australia, I was fortunate to spend time with many homeless men, women and children. It was a transformative experience. I could see that anyone could end up in that position through lack of family support.
But I still didn't know what to do. Fast forward a few years and I was generously sponsored by Horticulture Innovation Australia to travel overseas looking at the production of culinary rose petals.
I fell in love with all manner of edible flowers and the beauty they bestowed upon food during my travels. It seemed surprising to me that no-one was freeze drying edible flowers. Many of the restaurants and cafes I spoke to complained that their fresh edible flowers wilted and browned before they could use the whole container. Another one of my pet hates... food waste!
Yet I knew that I could create beautiful freeze dried edible flowers that would keep perfectly for 6 months using similar technology to our rose petal farm, Simply Rose Petals.
Whilst I was overseas my Mum and stepdad planted our first crop of edible flowers so that just as I returned home they were blooming beautifully and ready to be freeze dried. What was our first edible flower? Black cornflowers!
In 2014 we became the world's first freeze dried edible flower farm. Despite all this excitement though, I still felt something was missing. I couldn't shake the feeling that as a farmer it was my duty to produce food sustainably that would feed the world - 9 billion people to feed in 2025!
But I loved growing flowers. In a world where takeaway meals are more common that home-cooked, shouldn't we be encouraging anything that makes real food more enticing? According to Marie Forleo, it would cost 28 billion US dollars to provide every person in the world with their basic needs, yet we spend 52 billion US dollars per year on icecream!
Now, I'm not advocating you give up icecream. But edible flowers were hardly going to feed the world.
Or could they? Simply Edible Flowers... Feeding the World With Flowers® was born.
Simply Edible Flowers partnered with Australia's largest hunger relief organisation, Foodbank, so that every time you purchase a packet of our edible flowers, one meal will be donated to a person in need.
Now here's another really cool thing that happened about 1 year after we started the partnership with Foodbank - Brianna Casey was appointed as CEO. Brianna completed the very same program with the Australian Rural Leadership Program as I did at Kings Cross a few years earlier!
Today my Mum, my 90 year old Nanna, Leonie, Vikki and I, along with generous amounts of support from my stepdad Brian and my partner Andy, are proud to deliver you the most colourful, enticing freeze dried edible flowers direct from our farm.
Bring your cake decorations, cocktails and dinner parties to life with our edible roses, cornflowers, calendula, dianthus, snapdragons, pansies, violas, lavender and begonia.
A world first. A heritage spanning 40 years.
Pardon the pun... have a blooming good day!
Sarah xx
We would love to hear your special foodie stories too!
Contact us by:
Emailing - eatme{at}simplyedibleflowers.com.au
Tagging #simplyedibleflowers - www.instagram.com/simplyedibleflowers
Sharing - www.facebook.com/simplyedibleflowers
Tweeting - www.twitter.com/myedibleflowers