20161206 Unley Business Breakfast - Spring Gully

 
Unley Business Breakfast December 2016 - SAVING SPRING GULLY
 
The Business Breakfast, an initiative of the Rotary Club of Hyde park started in July 2011, has a memorandum of understanding between the Unley Council, The Eastside Business and Enterprise Centre and the Rotary club. The bi-monthly breakfasts held at the Unley Town Hall provide a productive opportunity for networking and always have very interesting speakers.
 
The guest speaker at the 33rd breakfast on the 6th December was Kevin Webb, talking about the Saving of Spring Gully Foods. Kevin, who is the step grandson of the founder and current manager of Spring Gully Foods, gave an interesting and comprehensive history of Spring Gully's origins.
 
The Company began as a small chicken and fruit tree farm, nestled in a gully near Morialta in the Adelaide Hills. Kevin's grandfather, Ted McKee, began pickling vegetables in the family kitchen and laundry, graduated to the car shed in 1946, then moved the operation into a specifically designed purpose built factory in 1966. In 1993 the company stepped up from local to national distribution and then to exporting oversea from their new premises in Dry Creek, near Port Adelaide.
 
For many decades they traded very successfully under the brands of Spring Gully, Leabrook Farms and Gardener Range with products such as gherkins, pickled onions, honey and jams. Sadly, the Award winning family business went into voluntary administration on April 13th 2013 after losing a contract to sell honey to Coles, who withdrew the local product in favour of imported honey from China.
 
The family made a decision to go public about their cash flow problem via the expectant media and the ensuing media campaign generated such huge local and national support that supermarkets were surprisingly quickly selling out of all their products. Local customers bought direct, spending as little as $3.00 to as much as $500.00. Many supermarkets put up special tables of Spring Gully products because the response was so great.
 
Much of the local popularity was synonymous with the support the company gave sporting clubs and welfare groups, having generously sponsored many baskets and food hampers of their products for over 70 years.
 
The company is working hard to clear the debts that lead to the cash flow problem and have paid back over 80% of the money owing in the last 3 years and intend to clear their debts with interest.
 
Spring Gully Foods is continuing to move forward with new innovations  and have a new slogan - Innovation not Duplication