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House of Assembly - Fifty-Fourth Parliament, First Session (54-1)
2018-09-19 Daily Xml
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MOJO Beverages

The Hon. L.W.K. BIGNELL (Mawson) (15:29): Today, I rise with some very exciting news on the business front in the electorate of Mawson, which is that local probiotic drink manufacturer MOJO has been 100 per cent bought out by the Coca-Cola Company.

This is a small company started by Anthony Crabb, who experimented with a probiotic drink, kombucha. I want to thank his friends and family who were brave enough to try those original drinks. Apparently a few were meant to be spat out. He worked and worked and worked to hone the perfect drink. He used to sell it at Willunga Farmers Market, and of course Willunga Farmers Market was the first farmers' market established in Australia 17 years ago.

He built up the business, and then in 2015, when I was the minister for primary industries, we gave the company a grant of $70,000 and also had them work with SARDI to finetune these drinks and work on ways they could grow their businesses. In September 2015, they also received a $20,000 grant from Kyam Maher, who was then the minister for manufacturing and innovation. Under the South Australian government's Business Transformation Voucher Program, this grant of $20,000 helped this company build up their business and transform it into a bigger business. That culminated in March this year—just a week or so before the election—when I was invited down by Anthony and his business to push the green button and start their bottling line because the business had grown so much by that stage.

I spoke to Kym Hodgeman while I was there. Kym of course was a great Glenelg footballer who runs a bottling distribution business. He told me that when they first started this business they brought a pallet of bottles and that it took them about a year to go through and fill them all up. It was probably about 2,000 or 3,000 bottles. He said that they are now buying about 11 million or 12 million bottles a year, so it is a huge jump up, and that 70 people are employed there now. Once we turned on that new bottling line, they had to go out and find another 10 workers. There was 70 there when we turned on the new bottling line in March this year.

With the acquisition by Coca-Cola, they are looking to treble the production, treble the workforce, and they are looking at about 200 people being employed there within the next year or so, with flow-on jobs, including the glass distributors, the bottle manufacturers here in South Australia. The label producers are a company called Openbook Howden at St Marys. They do the print and design, and I know that they are very excited about the work that they have done with MOJO over the years.

It is terrific to see a business, which started with an idea nurtured in the wonderful, healthy, premium community of Willunga, slowly growing to statewide distribution with a lot of help from Andrew Buttery, who is a well-known wine figure in the McLaren Vale area who took on the role of sales and distribution manager. It has grown at a state level, and then at a national level, and now this acquisition by Coca-Cola Amatil will allow them to expand even further afield right around Australia, with distribution into other parts of the world as well. I want to congratulate everyone involved in getting this company to the stage it is at now.

I just want to point out to the government, which keeps saying, 'We're going to get rid of all these grants programs because we don't believe in picking winners,' that we do have to help some of these businesses—and the work with SARDI to make sure that the taste was right, to make sure that you could keep the alcohol down during the fermentation process to get everything right with this product, and then also to get the technology right in the process of bottling and everything else. was really important—and we continue to help businesses like this because 210 jobs in my local area in the area of Willunga will be a huge boost for people in the south. We are excited by it. Again, massive thanks to Anthony and his family and all those hardworking 70 people who were there.

I know the boss of Coca-Cola from all over Asia was in town yesterday. On his first ever trip to Adelaide, he wanted to come down and talk to the workers and just say how important this was for Coca-Cola's worldwide company. To Anthony and everyone involved in MOJO, well done. It is a huge effort.

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