Icing on the cake: The niche market of easy-open packaging

In a cut-throat industry, Homebush Cakes has created a competitive advantage for itself through niche markets – including easy-to-open packaging. Samantha Schelling discovers the company’s recipe for success.

If passion for making high quality, delicious cakes was enough to ensure a successful business, Homebush Cakes would be set. But while passion alone is not enough, it’s a vital ingredient.

Val Leone’s business story goes back to 1970 when she began making French-inspired delicacies.

The sweet and savoury treats cooling on her kitchen window ledge in north-western Sydney were the beginning of a company that today employees some 40 people.

In the beginning, Leone made pâtés and quiches, delivering from a little food truck. Her son, Jeremy Burston, who took over the business in 1996, says people used to go up and ask her what ‘pats’ and ‘qwichies’ were because nobody had heard of them in the ’70s.”

Burston stopped pâté production in 1998, mainly to allow Homebush to concentrate on cakes.

“We couldn’t put money into two separate businesses essentially, so we chose to concentrate on the market
that was growing at such a huge rate,” Burston says.

“Years previously, somebody asked us to create flat cakes, and that was at least 50 per cent of the business for a long, long time.”

In the past few years, Burston has watched many small- to mid-range cake suppliers knocked out by larger, international bakeries.

“Our longevity was because we had a great reputation for really good quality. We were not cheap, but people knew the quality was good.

"Many cakes taste like cardboard basically, so it was our quality – and our original recipes – that made us stand out.

"We use lots of fresh, natural ingredients that we get from a local supplier – fresh carrot, zucchini, oranges… all sorts of things.”

But even those strong points are not enough to future-proof a company in the slice-and-dice cake world.

All wrapped up

“While flat cakes were a huge part of the business for a very long time, today it’s individual cake serves that are swamping the business,” he says.

“We supply these to aged care facilities and hospitals through New South Wales, and it now forms 50 per cent of our business.”

Today, Homebush Cakes is one of the biggest suppliers of individually wrapped cakes to hospitals and aged care in Australia. But, says Burston, it’s not something they specifically targeted.

“At the time, we had a rep seeking out new business for us, and had a meeting with Zdenka Fuller of HealthShare NSW [which is responsible for delivering 22 million meals a year to patients in 155 hospitals across that state].

“So many businesses say: ‘Buy off our brochure!’, but Jamie Bishop, my business partner, said: ‘Hang on, what do you want?’, and Zdenka said: ‘We need nutritional products in this high-protein, high-calcium banding.

“So we did that, and Zdenka said: “You guys are quite serious about this. You’re doing what we asked instead of telling us what to buy’.”

The next steps were to make the packaging easier to open and get a Packaging Accessibility Rating, a tool HealthShare NSW developed with Arthritis Australia, Nestlé and GTRI.

The Victorian government uses the rating, which is a mandatory requirement to select products in more than half Australia’s public hospitals.

The rating is also used nationally in aged care, and public and private hospitals by Institute of Hospitality and Health Care members.

As HealthShare NSW’s business support manager for food services, Zdenka Fuller has been working with food suppliers to increase nutrition in hospitals and aged care facilities through easier-to-open (ETO) food packaging.

The results have seen a dramatic improvement – and shake-up, with more than half the food suppliers replaced due to hard-to-open packaging.

Homebush Cakes’ initial rating was four, which they slowly upgraded to the top level of eight.

Upgrading investments

To produce individually wrapped pieces of cake in ETO packaging, Homebush Cakes has invested some $600,000 in new equipment, new factory areas, and new flooring to bring itself up to NSW Health Standards.

“For instance, the floor has to be perfect,” Burston says.

“There was a listeria scare in the hospitals which knocked out a major competitor, so that really shook up the whole town.

"We have management systems for everything. Wwe can provide bacteriological testing going back years.

“A lot of companies have gone broke in the last two years because of food poisoning, but we’re very serious in how we approach making our products.

"In fact, somebody tried to come in the other day from a construction company to take comparison photos.

"They were a bit shocked they weren’t allowed in; they thought they could just traipse through the factory without getting an induction and wearing the right clothes, but we’re very serious.”

Business doubled

Homebush has already begun supplying individually wrapped cake in ETO packaging in Victoria and Queensland.

Burston says the move to ETO packaging has “doubled the business”.

“It’s been incredible. Yes, we could possibly have reached this competitively sustainable position in some other way but this has completely protected our business – and you have to be serious about it.”

Burston credits co-owner Jamie Bishop as key to its success.

“Jamie is such a good salesperson, because he’s not a salesperson: he’s an owner of a business who will help.

“People don’t care what you’ve got, they want you to fix their problems – and the health system absolutely loves us because we fixed their problems.”

Consolidating

Although he’s only 50, Jeremy Burston has been in the business for 36 years – with a six-year break – since he was eight years of age, stamping lids for his mother and “doing other little things”.

Bringing in Jamie Bishop as co-owner three years ago has been a good move for the business.

Burston says Homebush will spend the foreseeable future growing more slowly – but still growing.

“We’re enjoying where we are at the moment.”

And although he gives away neither names nor direction, the director and co-owner of this thriving family-owned enterprise says there’s “a lot of new business coming on too”.