Dillicious Pickles has grown from a farmer’s market favourite into one of Australia’s most popular purveyors of premium pickles. Now, the Melbourne success story has its sights set on net zero.

Growing up in the US state of Virginia, James Barbour has always had a passion for pickles.

“From the time I was about two, I was eating them straight out of the jar,” he tells Business Builders. “They’ve been one of my favourite foods for my entire life, and I was missing what I was used to in the States. So when I couldn’t find them here, we decided to make the pickles ourselves.”

James met his future wife, Mornington Peninsula-raised Liza, on a volunteering trip in the Kingdom of Tonga. As fate would have it, the two would marry, have kids and start a life together in Melbourne – the place where their joint love of the humble dill pickle came to fruition.

The power of the pickle

In November 2018, James and Liza started making and selling pickles at farmers’ markets on the weekends.

“Over the next couple of months, they kept on selling out. That’s when we realised that we should have a real crack at making it a business, not a side hustle,” James explains.

With James’ background working in food production, logistics and supply chains, and Liza’s profession as an accredited dietitian, it felt like a calculated risk that might just pay off.

“I was working at a major supermarket and [after six months] I resigned from my job,” James says. “The rest is history.”

Today, Dillicious Pickles supplies burger chains, cafes, restaurants, shops, caterers and sporting stadiums across Australia – no small feat considering the small batch pickling process that takes place at their brinery in Melbourne’s south east.

The Barbour family at farmers’ markets. Image: Supplied.

The secret to the Dillicious crunch

Every week, anywhere from 3000 to 5000 kilos of cucumbers go through the painstaking process of pickling perfection.

“Each cucumber is handled by one of our team, and that surprises people because that’s a lot of cucumbers to be cutting by hand,” James says. “But that is one of the things that makes our pickles special.”

Made with fresh Kirby cucumbers from Queensland, the pickles are brined with all-natural ingredients including organic apple cider vinegar, salt and fresh dill.

Balancing crunch, nutrition and flavour profile, the pickles come in three varieties: Oh So Spicy (habanero and horseradish), Straight Up Garlic (caraway garlic) and Not So Sweet (honey jalapeno).

“Biting into a delicious pickle is very flavourful, very crunchy, and it’s something we want you to absolutely remember,” James adds.

Watch: Behind My Business – Dillicious Pickles (Story continues below)

Transitioning to net zero

Keeping the pickles fresh presents a significant energy challenge for the Dillicious team. “In our factory, the cool room definitely uses the most energy,” James explains. “Since 90 per cent of what we do is food service products, we have to store those products in a chilled environment.”

With that energy-intensive process, and the emissions of freight required to transport the cucumbers from Queensland to Melbourne, James and Liza decided to commit to becoming a net-zero business by 2028.

“It’s important to my wife and I personally, so that translates over to our business,” he says. “As a small business, I think there’s an opportunity for us to show the path to others of how you can be a better business for the environment.”

They enlisted the help of a Melbourne sustainability startup, n0de, to come up with a simple plan to get there. The lowest hanging fruit turned out to be installing solar – something tangible they could achieve with the proactive assistance of their energy provider AGL.

“When we got in touch with AGL to look into GreenPower, they were actually the ones who came back to us and helped us to progress with getting solar here at the factory,” James says.

“If it hadn’t been for AGL giving us the right nudge, it could have been one of those things that fell into the too-hard basket. But instead it became something that got done because we have the support of our energy company.”

One proud pickle: James at the Dillicious Pickles brinery in Melbourne. Image: Pinstripe Media.

Small actions make a big impact

Since installing solar last December, Dillicious has seen a significant impact on their power bills and energy usage.

And it’s only the beginning.

“I’m really excited about all the little things that we can actually achieve,” James says of the business’ net-zero plans. “So, improvements to our packaging, improvements to our freight, building a new cool room that’s more efficient – there’s a lot of things that we can do along the way that will create that big change we want to have.”

In their factory of green goodness, starting the transition to net zero turned out to be a lot more manageable than the Barbours expected. It’s a message James wants other small business owners to heed – you don’t need to do everything at once, just do something.

“It’s like anything in small business – set a goal and do it. Write down the things that are going to challenge you in doing it and come up with solutions for how you can get past them,” he says. “The number one thing with a net-zero goal is to just take small actions and they’ll turn into big action.”

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This article is brought to you by Business Builders in partnership with AGL.

Feature image: Supplied / Pinstripe Media