Liam Spurrell finds ingredients most of us would pass over. To us, a weed or a flower might merit little more than a passing glance but, to Spurrell, the wild-growing world is full of flavour – it’s just about knowing where to look. “Plenty of things grow around the place. Like, wild garlic is in now and it’ll finish up in a few weeks,” Spurrell says. “Watercress, winter purslane, they grow everywhere. Different kinds of eucalyptus and a few more natives like mountain pepper. Wild carrot flowers are about to start. Whatever we can find, whatever we can get our hands on, we’ll pretty much sell.”
Spurrell is a professional forager, and through his business Spurrell Foraging finds, sustainably picks and sells over 300 different types of edible wild plants – mainly to fine-dining restaurants looking for unique ingredients. Foraging is something of a rare trade these days, but it’s a skill Spurrell has been developing since former Vue de Monde head chef Cory Campbell came looking for foraged ingredients of his own.
“My brother used to work at Vue de Monde and [Campbell] came to where I was living, because we lived in quite a green area in Warrandyte,” Spurrell says. “He came out and was going, basically, ‘What’s around?’ I’d wanted to be a chef since I was six and I asked him if I could work on the weekends just to get some experience, and he said ‘As long as you bring in some of these [ingredients] when you come in.’ I basically started when I was 14, working weekends and picking for Vue that whole time.”
Spurrell followed his chef dreams at Vue de Monde through to an apprenticeship at Cutler & Co and back to the Vue Group, but it was a stint at Scott Pickett’s Estelle that would give him the confidence to forage full-time. “My head chef at the time was always being asked where he was finding things that nobody could get their hands on because they couldn’t buy it,” Spurrell says. “So I decided, why not test it out and see how we go? And that was eight years ago.”
The self-taught forager then started cold calling restaurants, which quickly led to lasting relationships. Now, Spurrell Foraging supplies more than 200 restaurants (including industry leaders like Attica), employing six full-time employees and three drivers, and farming some ingredients to meet the demand. Restaurants, says Spurrell, can’t get enough of his foraged food – and there’s a big reason why. “Some bigger places will use anything and just try to get as much flavour out as they can,” he says. “Like, people make watercress puree – that’s a pretty standard recipe, but they’re used to using hydroponic watercress. Because it’s hydroponically grown it will be a bit weaker, but with our stuff you can use basically half the amount and get the same product.”
As Spurrell Foraging has grown, so too has the work behind the scenes. The business started out as one man picking wild-growing ingredients, but adopting tools like Ordermentum has helped streamline operations, empowering Spurrell to become the industry leader he is today. One big improvement has been switching from manual to automatically generated invoices. It helps “with the volume of invoices”, he says, “Because we supply 50 or 60 deliveries a day and some could have 30, 40 items on them. Basically, I can jump on my phone, enter them in the system – and print them off. It gives me an extra hour a day to do stuff like get out and farm, go in to see restaurants, and do sales and things like that.”
This article is produced by Broadsheet in partnership with Ordermentum. Are you a Melbourne-based chef curious to explore Spurrell Foraging’s products? Check out the full range on Ordermentum.