“Can you write this story without using any pepper puns?” asks Josh Gardiner, co-founder of premium pepper company Pep. It’s unlikely. The branding features so much spicy wordplay, my job’s been done for me. But is the new product all it’s cracked up to be? (Sorry.)
The Pep talk started over steak au poivre (pepper steak) at France-Soir in South Yarra in 2022. Old old friends Gardiner, Myki Slonim and Royce Akers wondered about the origins of what was on their plates. “There were all these delicious ingredients in the meal – the oil and the butter and the meat itself – but then the conversation turned to the pepper,” recalls Gardiner. “Everyone knew the salts they had at home, but not the pepper.”
The trio – who met in the 2000s and played in a Bangles cover band together before working at Vice Australia – started quizzing friends and neighbours about their choice of seasoning. “They would proudly rattle off their Malden, their pink Himalayan, their sea salt, their kosher salt,” Slonim tells Broadsheet. But when they asked about pepper they’d get “a stunned, or even embarrassed, look from someone who fancies themselves as a home chef.”
Like many of the best ideas, it’s surprising this one hasn’t been done before. “So many people say, ‘I’m a pepper fiend, I love black pepper, I put too much of it on everything’, but like us they had never really thought about it, or tasted a better pepper,” says Akers.
“It was an epiphany we had,” continues Gardiner. “There are many chefs who know [a lot about pepper] – we’re not revelatory in that way – but we’re talking about reaching people like us.”
The gap in the market was clear, but they needed to source a product that was far from the “run-of-the-mill” peppers on supermarket shelves. They sampled dozens of varieties on balls of plain white rice (the best vehicle for tasting pepper) before landing on a single-origin peppercorn grown in Cambodia’s Memot district.
Next came the memorable red and yellow branding (“Un-Meh Your Pepper”), designed with another mate, art director Benny Moore. “We wanted [the branding] to look like it had been around a long time but not be a pastiche of retro,” says Akers. “And he was happy to do a million versions of it.”
Pep the goat, the brand’s mascot, was actually a horse for a long time before the design was finalised (“It’s got kick!”). The black cylindrical grinder is made of glass and a ceramic mechanism for optimum crack. Need a refill? Pep also comes in 50-gram boxes. “The challenge was to make a grinder that looked good,” says Slonim. “We wanted it to be reusable, and for it to work really well.”
The finished product? It’s… a cracker. Generous grinds of fragrant, herbaceous black pepper with notes of chocolate and citrus which can elevate everything from eggs to salads to a bloody Mary. For now, you can find it online or at specialty Melbourne retailers such as Morning Market, Maker & Monger, Cibi, Blackhearts and Sparrows and Spring Street Grocer (with more to come).
The reaction has been genuinely warm so far, according to the team. “We have people say, ‘It’s just so peppery’,” says Gardiner. “We’re on the same journey as coffee. People didn’t talk about aromas, origins and notes before, but there’s a whole world of pepper out there, and we want people to expect more from it.”
“After all,” says Slonim. “It’s the last thing you put on your meal.”