Welcome to our Summer Newsletter!
We do usually release our newsletters on the 1st day of each season, but this year is different and challenging for us in many ways.
After a long Winter that was "one of a kind" with rain, snow & hail that turned our orchard and veggie garden into wetlands, we are now finally having some warmer weather coming up. There weren’t many occasions were we could do some meaningful work during Winter and Spring with the grass areas turning into mud pits, but slowly it dried off and our fruit trees bounced back from the Winter sleep.
Our raspberries are growing fantastic and flowering early. The fruit that set in our orchard looks very promising and there might be a bountiful harvest coming up.
Challenges
It has been a very long and tough year 2020 for Naturally Berry.
Our troubles started in December 2019 when we applied (with assistance of Regional Development Victoria) for an Artisan Grant to purchase OHS equipment and to help us to move to a different location with better facilities and create employment opportunities.
After 5 months of waiting and not a single word from the Government department we enquired regarding the status of our application just to get told that we had been unsuccessful. They could not even have been bothered to tell us... This left us with large additional expenses which will impact our small business for a long time.
In February we purchased a large amount of glassware as our products became more and more popular during 2019. Then the world changed and all was sitting idle for most of the time....
Since the lockdown in March we had to reduce our cooking considerably. As a consequence there was also a drought of new products that we normally release every season with no releases last Spring.
We all got a long reality-check this year, that is ongoing and makes doing business extremely challenging. At the start we had produce shortages because of panic buying, lately we were faced with delays due to port workers on strike.
To make our live even more challenging we also got dealt a very bad hand with inferior pectin and are still being ignored by a Australian company who supplied it and who we are a long time loyal customer with. We are still under extreme pressure to rectify this as we faced a very high demand of wholesale orders flooding in and our products are at a minimum.
Business can be challenging if you trust that your supply stays the same and then discover that 200 products are a throwaway. Not a good place to be in when Christmas is on your doorstep.
Challenges however always present opportunities, to evolve, grow or reassess and that’s what we did to become more independent from single suppliers that control the market.
The times were and are still uncertain but at least the wait for some fresh products is now luckily over, BIG time.
