Shannon Martinez Is Expanding Smith & Daughters – Starting With a New Degraves Street Deli

“It’s a headfuck for me,” Shannon Martinez says. “Going from how hard it’s been to now opening new stores – it took me a while to get my head readjusted.” The Smith & Daughters founder, who’s also the country’s pre-eminent plant-based chef, is set to majorly expand her business thanks to an injection of capital from impact investor Kelly Jarrett. “We’re finally doing all the things that I knew this could be, but it just needed investment.”

At the end of April, Jarrett and Martinez (who is not vegan herself) will open a new outpost of Smith & Deli, the plant-based cafe and deli known for salads, sandwiches and vegan baked goods, on Degraves Street. They plan to start looking for a third site (likely south-side, though nothing’s set in stone) at the end of the year, then take the concept interstate, starting with Brisbane. 

In two weeks, Smith & Deli’s ready-made meals and grocery items, currently only available in-store, will be available for state-wide delivery via the company’s website. Later this year, the pair will launch Made by Smith, a wholesale business geared towards making high-quality plant-based alternatives to meat and dairy products specifically for chefs. They’ll start with what Martinez calls “really simple things”. These include aioli, cheese sauces (made from fermented tofu and soy milk) and other “tweakable” bases for chefs. From there, they hope to offer meat alternatives, more labour-intensive products that take three days to make.

But the new CBD deli will be the first major project from the newly formed Tomorrow Food Group, which now encompasses Smith & Daughters, Smith & Deli and Made by Smith. 

The new deli will be small compared to the Collingwood original, though large for a CBD laneway, with 22 seats. During the day, there’ll be less focus on the sandwiches Collingwood is known for (though they’ll still be on offer), and more focus on cafeteria-style dining, allowing for quick service. You’ll be encouraged to build your own lunch plate by choosing from a range of changing, seasonal hot mains, salads and soups. Most of the food, including vegan croissants and doughnuts, will come from Smith & Deli’s production kitchen in Collingwood.

At night, the team will take advantage of an 11pm liquor licence and flip the deli into more of a Spanish tapas bar, with snacks that draw from existing Smith & Daughters recipes and a small wine list. 

Freezers will be stocked with Smith & Daughters take-home meals such as lasagne. “People can sort of swing past on their way to the train, grab a couple of things they can just throw into the oven when they get home, make a salad and then dinner’s done.”

A mutual friend, who knew Jarrett was interested in starting a plant-based food business, introduced the pair. “[Jarrett] approached me, but not to join the company,” says Martinez. “She came in and was asking these questions, and I just was honest with her and said, ‘It’s so hard, obviously, just restaurants in general, and the fact that you don’t have experience in them.’ I said, ‘My advice would be to join me, because we’re here 12 years later and the only thing stopping us being able to do the thing that we need to do is financing’.”

The deal was made official in December, taking Martinez from a place where she was “sticky-taping jugs together because I couldn’t afford to fix one,” to today, where she’s working with Jarrett to build a plant-based empire.

“I had almost given up hope completely. Because I tried every trick in the book. I did everything. I worked outside jobs to be able to keep this thing afloat. I’ve done everything I could – I worked through cancer, worked through Covid. I didn’t know what else to do, and this came at the last minute,” says Martinez. “The timing of it all – everything – seriously, it was meant to be.”

Smith & Deli at 16 Degraves Street is expected to open at the end of April.