AN official opening event at the glamourous new Ritz-Carlton hotel at Elizabeth Quay in Perth recently held extra special significance for David Thompson and Lance McLeod.
The Moojepin Foods business partners were part of an exclusive group of producers and suppliers to attend, having been selected to supply their produce to the hotel chain's restaurant, Hearth.
This show of faith by Hearth head chef Jed Gerrard, who has reportedly wanted to source as many WA grown ingredients as possible, represented yet another milestone in the organic growth of the saline native food business over the past year.
Since cementing their 50:50 business partnership in Moojepin Foods late last year, the duo has grown the venture to the point that they are packaging and distributing native saline ingredients from their Canning Vale warehouse, both locally and interstate twice a week.
For this duo it isn't the first time either of them have been involved in a food venture.
Mr Thompson is a Katanning-based sheep breeder, who founded Moojepin Merino stud in 1993 and later moved to a multi-purpose Merino breeding program in 2000.
The enterprising farmer looked to diversify and started selling dry-aged mutton direct to chefs under the banner Moojepin Merino Meats.
Meanwhile Mr McLeod is a premium food distributor based in Perth, sourcing and selling a variety of WA produce through his family company WAGOGA since 2016.
It was through Mr Thompson's mutton that the duo first had dealings with each other.
One of the restaurants he was supplying with the 1000-day grazed and dry-aged mutton product was Print Hall in the Perth CBD.
In early 2015, executive chef Dan Fisher contacted Mr Thompson to see whether, in addition to the mutton, he had access to any saltbush.
"He was looking for local saltbush, because he was getting some from South Australia, but it had to be treated with gas before it was allowed to enter WA, which meant he had to add some salt to it before he could use it to garnish dishes," Mr Thompson said.
"So I organised a 20 kilogram sample of good quality oldman saltbush from our home farm and sent it up to him."
For Mr Thompson, it was a bit of a lightbulb moment, as until then saltbush had most commonly been viewed as a hardy native shrub suitable for growing on saline land and for livestock to graze on.
"It was the first time I'd ever even looked at doing something like that, and it really was the beginning of what would eventually become Moojepin Foods, because I've foraged for saltbush every month since then," he said.
Soon after, Mr McLeod said a story about saltbush as a native ingredient on the ABC resulted in his newly-established business taking phone calls from customers, asking after its availability.
He came across an Instagram post by a chef who had sourced and used saltbush from Mr Thompson, and so he tracked him down in the hope of arranging a supply partnership.
"I called David to see whether I could distribute the saltbush through my business WAGOGA, so we set about me purchasing it off David, to on-sell to restaurants in Perth," Mr McLeod said.
Never one to do things by halves, Mr Thompson soon expanded their focus to include foraging for other native saline varieties, including samphire, red karkalla and slender ice plant.
Demand soon grew for each of the varieties, and last year they received a big boost in confidence when they received a gold medal in the 'from the earth' category at the Delicious Produce Awards for the edible succulent red karkalla, which is commonly known as baby pigface.
Renowned Australian chef Peter Gilmore, of Quay restaurant in Sydney, New South Wales, sought supplies of the product, a ground-covering creeper which grows grape-like fruit, along with their slender ice plant.
"Off the back of that success we decided to make a go of it, and set up a partnership in late 2018, Moojepin Foods," Mr Thompson said.
"We've been slowly growing the business organically since then."
Their roles within the partnership are clear - Mr Thompson takes care of the on-farm sourcing and foraging, while Mr McLeod looks to generate new sales and push the product, although they are both good sounding boards for each other.
This year Mr McLeod has successfully exported the produce interstate, shipping to two wholesalers in Sydney and one in Victoria.
The produce is packed into both 70 and 200 gram punnets and one kilogram cartons for sale, with pricing dependent on seasonal availability.
Mr McLeod said one of the biggest selling points of their produce was the quality of the product, which they worked hard to ensure was consistent from week to week.
"We want to be able to sell into the high end of the market with a quality product and constant supply," he said.
Currently Mr Thompson forages from 80 hectares of saline land on his and two neighbours' properties under licence from the Department of Parks and Wildlife.
"We have to submit how much we pick and sell each month under the licence, even when it's on our own property," he said.
But while the supply of saltbush is consistent, with it readily available 12 months of the year, samphire, also known as sea asparagus, is more seasonal, growing over the warmer months and only up to nine months of the year, as is also the case with the red karkalla and slender ice plant.
In an effort to further improve the consistency of supply, the men are investigating the possibility of the saline plants growing in a controlled environment.
They have secured funding from the Department of Primary Industries and Regional Development under the Smart Farming Partnerships to build two greenhouses, in which they will run trials of the varieties.
One greenhouse has already been built, with the second under construction.
"The plan is for them to be saline hydroponic greenhouses, mainly focussing on growing the slender ice plant and karkalla to see if we can extend their seasonality," Mr Thompson said.
"It's all an unknown at this stage as to whether it's even possible to do this.
"It's also been difficult to get expertise regarding the pumps and set-ups, as it's quite a pioneering project."
Mr Thompson, who has about 300ha of salt affected land on his property, said ultimately they were hoping the trial could show whether the varieties could be grown on a commercial scale by growing them hydroponically, and if so, they were putting in different types of irrigation systems to see which worked best.
"It will also depend on the amount and quality of the water that is available at the site, we're in the process of putting in a bore at the moment," he said.
If all goes well, Mr Thompson hopes to have things up and running to the point that they can host an on-farm open day next September to showcase the greenhouses.
Ultimately he would love to get to a point where he could have more farmers join him in foraging the native plants to sell, to hopefully make some money from what would otherwise be useless, waste land.
"WA is the driest State in the driest continent in the world, and so much of our available water sources are salt water," Mr Thompson said.
"We might as well make some money out of that salt water by growing plants that thrive in it - there are massive amounts of country this can be done on.
"And the amazing thing is that samphire, for example, is 98 per cent water, whereas wheat is only up to 10pc moisture, and you can make good money from a bucket-full of samphire."
Mr Thompson said he was surprised back in 2017 when he looked at getting samphire tested for human consumption and discovered only minimal testing had been done.
"A lot of people don't know what to do with it - whereas in the northern hemisphere samphire is widely used as a common ingredient," he said.
In the meantime, both men hope to continue to slowly grow their business, in the form of further expanding interstate to supply even more chefs, and even possibly overseas.
"We hope the deal with the Ritz-Carlton may even open the door to the international export market, given the northern hemisphere markets of Europe and USA are already familiar with such products and have the opposite seasons to us, so we may be an option to help fill in the gap," Mr McLeod said.
He said the popularity of native ingredients had increased of late, due to media exposure through cooking shows, as well as being driven by chefs posting their creations on social media.
"Salinity produce and anything native, the media is definitely helping to push them," Mr McLeod said.
And while there isn't much information available on national wholesales of saline products, he said the market was telling them their products were good.
"Every step we make at the moment is a good step - we want to make sure we can grow enough to meet future markets, but we're happy to grow organically and not too quickly," he said.