‘Country made’: Vasse Virgin, Beerenberg, Jurlique and Cygnet Perfumery

Australian regional businesses have always had to contend with geography. Lately, they have endured a slew of cost-of-living pressures, volatile fuel and freight costs, tariff uncertainty and an economy asking consumers and businesses to make every dollar travel further. Yet across the country, regional enterprises continue to adapt and prosper, often because of where they are, not in spite of it.It is an understanding former prime minister Gough Whitlam articulated in his 1972 election speech, when he spoke of “a great fact of our national life – the interdependence between city and country”. More than half a century later, that relationship is still prosperous, generating the products Australians bring into their homes every day.Inside FMCG has travelled beyond the capitals to meet 14 remarkable consumer businesses whose identity is inseparable from the towns where they reside. What we found was a plethora of diversity. From a camel dairy in Queensland, to a female-led body-care social enterprise in Angurugu on Groote Eylandt, home to fewer than 1000 people, to a berry farm that found opportunity in miniature airline portions, to a barramundi producer operating among the red earth and tropical heat of Humpty Doo.Australia’s regional landscape not only provides vivacious characters but also unique ingredients, knowledge and community. Geography presents its complications, certainly, but it can also become an advantage impossible to manufacture elsewhere – and these businesses prove that point.Vasse VirginWilyabrup, WAMargaret River olive oil is becoming skincare sold around the world.Vasse Virgin began far from a beauty counter, on a sheep farm in Kojonup, where Edwina and Louis Scherini were trying to soothe their children’s skin problems. Thirty-two years ago, natural skincare offered few obvious answers, so Edwina reached for Louis’s best Italian extra virgin olive oil. His response – “Do you really have to use that one?” – met a fairly decisive reply: “It’s going on your children’s skin. Why wouldn’t we use the best quality we have?”That makeshift antidote became the foundation for months of kitchen-bench experimentation. Quality olive oil contains antioxidants and fatty acids that help moisturise and support the skin barrier, so Vasse Virgin turned that premise into olive-oil soaps and balms, then a range of skincare products. Eighteen months of trial batches led to country markets, wholesale supply to pharmacies and gift stores, and now exports to Singapore and the US.Vasse Virgin maintains its own olive grove and produces extra virgin olive oil from estate-grown and other Western Australian olives. Margaret River gave the brand a stage as well as a factory. At its Wilyabrup factory, visitors can watch soaps being cut and product containers filled, labelled and packed. “I had no idea everything was actually made here,” Edwina said customers often tell them.In a region obsessed with wine tasting, Vasse Virgin has made skincare an unlikely but special part of the tasting itinerary.BeerenbergHahndorf, SAA roadside strawberry shed found a Qantas partnership. Now it’s a prolific brand with a national audience.From Margaret River, the road east eventually reaches Hahndorf, where six generations of the Paech family have farmed the same Adelaide Hills land since their ancestors settled there in 1839. Beerenberg farm came much later, after Grant and Carol Paech planted strawberries in 1969, sold them from a roadside tin shed and, in 1971, turned the leftover fruit into jam.In 1986, Grant persuaded Qantas to serve Beerenberg jam, then had to work out how to manufacture the miniature jars. Speaking to Inside FMCG, CEO Robert Priest said the partnership got Beerenberg on the map, and this year, the two businesses marked 40 years together. Today, the range approaches 100 products – jams, chutneys, relishes, sauces, dressings and meal bases, sold through Coles, Woolworths, Aldi and independent grocers.Beerenberg still makes its products in Hahndorf and visitors can test the claim themselves as the farm shop and café sit beside the strawberry fields, where pick-your-own season turns customers into temporary harvesters. Scant national brands invite shoppers to meet the fruit before breakfast and fewer still can point to a family address nearly two centuries old.“Hahndorf is central to who we are,” Priest said. “We want the strawberries to always come from our farm.”JurliqueBiggs Flat, SAForty years on, the Adelaide Hills still turn flowers into global skincare.A short drive through the Adelaide Hills takes the road from jam to jojoba. Jurlique began here in 1985, when scientist and naturopath Jurgen Klein and botanist Ulrike Klein established a farm devoted to plants that would eventually appear in creams, oils, serums, mists and the brand’s familiar rose hand cream.Four decades later, the farm at Biggs Flat remains part of a larger beauty operation. Jurlique stated that its products reach more than 27 markets. Australian customers encounter the brand through its own network and department stores including Myer and David Jones. In the Adelaide Hills, visitors can tour the working biodynamic farm, see plants being propagated and harvested, and finish at the farm shop.Jurlique’s global head of product marketing and innovation, Aline Lerond, explained growing key ingredients on the farm allows the company to manage cultivation and handling before extraction, where proprietary methods are used to concentrate plant compounds for skincare formulations.“We like to call ourselves a global brand with an Australian heart,” Lerond said, “and we’re proud to bring farm-grown beauty to 27-plus markets across the globe.”Jurlique’s international beauty business still begins with rows of plants, some very expensive science, and dirt under somebody’s fingernails.Cygnet PerfumeryKoonwarra, VicSondrine Kehoe has introduced perfume as the most portable form of landscape.Sondrine Kehoe made her first alcohol-based perfume at 12 from vodka, essential oils and violet syrup sweetened with honey. Kehoe said she still has that very same bottle.Now, after training in midwifery and becoming a mother herself, the childhood preoccupation has become Cygnet Perfumery, a small-batch fragrance and skincare house based in country Victoria.Kehoe formulates and manufactures in-house, using 100 per cent natural ingredients sourced locally and from artisan distillers around the world. Her range includes six extrait de parfums adorned with names such as Antiquarian, Seville, Plein Air and Vigneron.“Every perfume and skincare product is still made by hand in small batches,” Kehoe told Inside FMCG, allowing her to use traditional techniques that carry higher material and labour costs than industrial fragrance production.Country Victoria supplies less quantifiable ingredients. Gardens, native bushland, orchards and seasonal changes enter what Kehoe calls her “visual and sensory vocabulary”. For city customers, she likes the idea of fragrance transporting them. “Each perfume can become a kind of olfactory postcard.”Cygnet’s studio may be small, but what leaves it is, in effect, bottled scenery.Originally published in the October edition of Inside FMCG.