Demand for local organic sourdough continues to rise

LOCKDOWN saw many people attempt to bake homemade organic sourdough with terabytes and petabytes of smartphone videos posted on Instagram and TikTok documenting the unexpected global trend.

As life in Australia returns to normal, the love of the loaf has continued even if people no longer have the time to bake the bread themselves.

Iconic Surf Coast bakery Zeally Bay Sourdough has ridden the wave of demand and taken organic baking to the next level with its popular single origin bio-dynamic loaf.

The ‘Mallee Loaf’ was the star of a recent ABC Landline program where the show visited the bakery, as well as the Mallee region and the farm where the grain for the bio-dynamic loaf was sourced.

Co-founder John Farnan was happy with the exposure but warns everything is not what it seems in the world of organic baking.

“A loaf of bread is a bit of a mystery bag in a sense. If it’s not fully labelled it’s not fully describing the ingredients,” Mr Farnan said.

“A little bit of organic is sold as mostly or totally organic.”

Zeally Bay Sourdough is a local pioneer in certified organic and bio-dynamic breads and other pantry products such as muesli and granola.

John and his wife Jan have been making their unique organic bread since 1980 at Wholefoods Kitchen in Geelong, well before sourdough became a household staple.

John says that ‘greenwash’ and ‘organic-wash’ is on the rise and many consumers might think the bread they are getting is organic when it actually isn’t.

“People talk about local province and traceability but you can’t beat the old organic certification because it’s fully documented from the grower to the end user,” he says.

Zeally Bay Sourdough is motivated by doing good rather than profit and has its roots in 1970s surf culture and the bakery’s home on the Surf Coast.

John arrived in Torquay in 1976 in his kombi van from South Australia.

“We came to Torquay because we followed that kind of surfing lifestyle,” he says.

In 1981, John started a cafe called Wholefoods Kitchen.

From the beginning they had the ethos of making everything themselves.“We started out making chapatis,” he recalls.

“For every sandwich we sold, it’s ridiculously hard work when made from scratch, but we were young and silly.”

John had a romantic view of an alternative lifestyle that was perhaps influenced in part by the movie Morning of the Earth, a legendary film among the surfing community.

“It was about going up country, leaving the city and leading a non-materialistic sort of life in the countryside, growing your own veggies, keeping goats, all that,” he said.

“Can I use the word ‘hippy’?”

At the age of 70 John is still surfing and sees parallels in his own journey with those now making the move away from the city due to the pandemic.

The business now employs more than 40 people and they distribute their sought-after products all across the Surf Coast, Melbourne, the Mornington Peninsula to the edges of Gippsland and as far down as Port Fairy and Hamilton.

“We send our muesli and granola even further and people can buy it online too,” John says.