What started as a group project for three uni students could become one of the most important, and sustainable, names in Aussie drinks.
Do you ever come across someone younger than you who makes you wonder what you spent that period of your life even doing? The 99-ATAR high-schooler, the straight-HD student, or the kid who seemingly has everything figured out at an age you were still living with your parents? Well, you may be pleased to know that throughout Australian campuses right now, there are more of these infuriatingly inspiring young adults than ever. And they’re coming up with solutions to problems so ingenious and inventive that you very quickly come to realise the future is in good hands.
This brings us to Wonki – a new and innovative premix brand that started out as a university project. It’s the brainchild of Melbourne trio Max Moolman, Bridget Lansell and Gabriel Tucker, who were thrust together in a Monash University start-up program called Fast Track and given one simple task: work together over a year to come up with a business idea that makes a difference.
“We all aligned super quickly because we're super outdoorsy and we wanted to do something that was going to have some kind of positive impact,” Max tells us from the Monash Uni working space (yes, he’s still studying). “Gabe was playing bowls one day and noticed they had a ‘beers for bowls’ initiative where they were taking proceeds from beer sales and giving it to bowlos that were going under. Straight away we had this idea of ‘impact alcohol’, but at the same time we were also studying the impact of food waste and realised we could bring those two ideas together.”
And so Wonki was born – a stunningly simple concept that’s revolutionary in its impact: take the unwanted fruit that so often goes to landfill, smoosh it up and turn it into a kick-ass range of ready-to-drink bevs (RTDs) that taps into the public’s insatiable thirst for clean, easy-drinking summer mixes (Max and Bridget have pivoted away from the term seltzer because Wonki uses vodka as its base spirit, alongside soda). Even so, their teachers were initially not impressed. “We literally pitched it to the program on the first lesson and they just go, ‘Guys, what do you think you're doing? This idea hasn’t been validated at all, it isn’t a business.’ That was a bit of a shock, but it was so good because it forced us to spend the next 12 months actually going out there. We interviewed about 150 students. We'd literally go into Dan Murphy's and bombard someone and say, ‘Hey, what do you think of this? Does this work for you? What would you do differently? How would you change it to better suit a product that you actually want to see? And we just kept iterating and iterating until we got to a point where it was resonating a lot with people and it just kept giving us the momentum and really good reasons to keep pushing forward with this idea that was now turning into something that could actually save a lot of fruit from becoming waste.”
Of course, devising a theoretical business for a project is one thing; turning it into reality is another. As the brand was coming to life and starting to look like a tangible product, they learned the winners of the program would receive a cash prize. Wonki came second, receiving the funds it needed to go legit. The rest, after a successful round of crowdfunding and the company’s first injection of $150,000 in seed capital, is history. These three full-time students are now full-time entrepreneurs.
Now, the public is getting to see how good the product really is – something Wonki achieves by combining two core tenets of sustainability: waste reduction and seasonality. The trio will work with local farms and Farmer’s Pick (a company on a similar mission that delivers boxes of ‘imperfect’ fruit and veg) to devise flavours and limited releases based on what’s in abundance at the time. The brand’s first flavour was Cucumber and Lime, now sold out (it’s strictly seasonal, after all), but there’s plenty more on the way. The impact they’ve already had is staggering: in every production run, Wonki saves around five tonnes of fruit (or around three kilos of fruit per case) that would otherwise have gone straight to landfill.
What’s perhaps more impressive is the brand’s impact will only grow as it does. Eventually, they could eliminate an entire farm's waste with the drop of a new flavour. “For every two oranges grown in this country, for instance, one gets thrown out,” Max says. “We had a chat with one of the farms we’ve already worked with, Red Belly Citrus up in Griffith [NSW],” says Max. “They told us last season they had 300 tonnes of blood oranges and mandarins that just didn't get used at all.” For us to eliminate all that, we need to seriously scale.” While they wait for that growth to happen, they’ve just released a brand new Blood Orange and Mandarin flavour that’s as delicious as it sounds, and makes an excellent first step in saving plenty of food from becoming waste. Word on the grapevine is there’s a Watermelon and Lemon on the way very shortly.
Scaling isn’t the only thing on their mind. Where there’s would-be trash, there’s treasure to be had. Clean-drinking premixes are, of course, the drink du jour right now, but the cogs are already turning around potential areas of expansion – something Max, Bridget and Gabe are looking inwards for. “We were literally thinking yesterday about how to cut down on our own waste streams even further. We’d love to partner with someone like an ice-creamery or gelato shop where we can go and freeze all our leftover juice and, hopefully, turn it into something delicious again. Beyond that, there’s a natural succession in what we can make. We’re already thinking about ideas for things like liqueurs and limoncellos.”
The possibilities, then, are endless, and Wonki looks to be a name that’s here for good – in every sense of the word.
