Christmas in July Present for Bluestone Yeast

Wow, what a month it has been here at Bluestone Yeast! We’ve been in a whirlwind of activity, marked by a rollercoaster of stress, anxiety, and excitement. As many of you know, we’ve been striving to expand our facility for over four years now. We outgrew our current location more than three years ago and have been bursting at the seams ever since. We keep taking over offices and turning them into labs. We can’t thank Alira and the team at Eastern Business Innovation Center enough for their help and support.

The road to expansion has been a Journey! After an exhaustive (unsuccessful) search for a suitable site, we took the decision to get a factory shell in Coburg North 18 months ago, with the goal to transform it into a food production facility. This road has been long, expensive, and frustrating, involving countless dealings with architects and engineers. Finally, we reached a stage where we could solicit quotes from builders. However, we faced more delays, and the quotes we received were prohibitively high, making the numbers untenable. Building in Victoria has become incredibly challenging, with builders pricing themselves out of the market—or perhaps I just don’t have the necessary funds.

Thankfully, I had a Plan B strategy running in parallel. It’s crucial to be ready to pivot at a moment’s notice. Plan B involved continuing the search for ready-to-use premises and being prepared to act quickly if such an opportunity arose.

On Wednesday, the 26th of June, I received a property alert on my phone. On a whim, I clicked the link, expecting to see another empty warehouse shell. To my surprise, it was a fully equipped food factory! Excitedly, I zoomed in on the pictures and realized this could work. I immediately called the agent and arranged a viewing for the next morning. By 11 am the next day, we had inspected the site, and within 30 minutes, we put in an offer to lease and paid the deposit that afternoon.

Our offer was accepted the following week, but we had to endure a nerve-wracking two-week wait to finalize the signatures and execute the lease. My stress and excitement levels ran in parallel during this period. Once the lease was secured, we dove headfirst into obtaining permits, planning approvals, and other necessary steps to get our business up and running in the new location. We have been moving at a frantic pace since signing the lease. We moved last week and have been setting up the new space and started production at the same time. My staff have been amazing at getting us moved and up and running in just a couple of days. It has been like when you move house and don’t know where to put everything and it can be a bit overwhelming. Well it has been like that for us but on steroids! So my team definitely deserves a beer after going through that pain!

The new space also means that all the exciting projects and developments that have been on hold can now start to take shape. Stay tuned for more updates!

In between all the chaos of the last couple of weeks Bluestone Yeast was nominated for a Monash Business Award and were shortlisted as a finalist for the Manufacturing awards! We attended the presentation dinner at Huntingdale Golf Course and given it is just a short drive from Kaiju Cantina, I took the opportunity to drop in and sample some great beer! See photo.