By Margaret Maccoll
Queensland AgriFutures Rural Women’s Award winner Jacqui Wilson-Smith of Eerwah Vale has achieved success in agricultural business by putting the customer first and is now helping others to do the same.
Jacqui, who is global head of innovation for pre-packaged herb business Gourmet Garden and co-founder of the Food and Agribusiness Network (FAN), said focusing on what the customer wanted instead of day-to-day business changed the way a business operated.
“Gourmet Garden was born out of an understanding that herbs don’t last, and that our customers needed a solution for that,” she said.
“We worked as a team to understand the customer’s pain point, and to solve that together. Without the input across every area of the business – farmers, food technologists, operations staff, supply chain and export markets – this idea would never have come to fruition.”
Well known for its range of herbs packaged in toothpaste-tube style products Gourmet Garden sold last year to US McCormick Group for $150 million.
For her Rural Women’s Award Jacqui received a $10,000 bursary which she is using to partner with educators, government and industry to create a pilot case study and online training module, based on the FAN platform, that will eventually provide similar connections for rural food and agribusiness across Australia.
In the first instance, she will deliver a documentary case study on Gourmet Garden to show time-poor companies how to make more informed decisions around innovation.
“The hard thing is – it’s all very well to talk about innovation – but people need to be shown how to make it happen,” she said.
“We want to share the trials and tribulations we’ve had along the way, how we overcame challenges, what lessons we learnt, what we think the recipe for success is.”
The information will be made available on the FAN website at foodagribusiness.org.au/ and will include innovation tools such as journey mapping.
The mapping takes a product from the farm to the plate showing the process a customer travels to buy their food and includes elements such as planning and shopping for meals and choosing packaging.
“We do it so we can understand end to end the consumer experience,” Jacqui said.
Jacqui will attend the national awards at the 2017 AgriFutures Rural Women’s Award Gala Dinner which will take place in the Great Hall at Parliament House, Canberra, on Wednesday 13 September.
