Pancakes With Purpose
Words–
Nat Woods
@nat.woods_
Photos–
Anna Hutchcroft
@annahutch_photo
Pancake Legends–
Pancakes With Purpose
@pancakeswithpurpose
When we’re young, we often get asked ‘What do you want to be when you grow up?’ It’s a cute conversation starter, but let’s be real, there’s no way some of us could have fathomed where we would end up. But then again, maybe a ten year old would answer with ‘I want to make pancakes for work!’, so perhaps we do need to listen to our inner child. It sounds like Ben Vinden and Oli Wright of Pancakes With Purpose certainly did listen to the pancake-loving child inside themselves.
So tell us, how do two friends move to Byron Bay and then wind up starting a pancake business?
Ben: I guess it all started out as a passing conversation on a rooftop in Mexico. It was about 40 degrees celsius and we were sitting around listening to reggae and sweating. We heard someone yelling on the street below us and looked down to see an old lady wheeling a cart of homemade aguas frescas (cold drinks) along the street. Oli ran down and bought a huge cup of Agua de Horchata which is a traditional Mexican drink made from a mixture of soaked white rice, cinnamon and sweetened condensed milk. It sounds weird, but in that moment that drink blew our minds. We had one of those classic travel moments where you’re like, “Why don’t we have this at home?!?!”.
Oli: For the next week I remember Ben jotting down notes and essentially formulating a business plan on how we were gonna take over the world with cold drinks. I was pretty skeptical at the time, but we were both at a point where we were looking for a change in the course of our lives and thinking deeply about where we might want to be in five or ten years time. One and a half years later, after wrangling a few Panamanian pirates and dealing with our fair share of dodgy Colombian mechanics and corrupt police, we moved back home to Byron Bay to pursue this business idea.
B: Somehow one idea evolved into the next, and we ended up deciding to start a business making pancakes out of bananas that are too ugly to be sold in the supermarket. Don’t ask how we got from A to B.
You’ve both recently graduated from uni. What did your family and friends say when you told them you were going into the business of breakfast?
B: We haven’t graduated from uni, we actually both dropped out! Or maybe it’s just better to say we took a break and never went back …
O: Having our friends and family know that we dropped out of uni to start our own business definitely placed a lot of pressure on the whole situation initially. When we told people what we were doing they were often excited, but you could tell they were also thinking ‘these boys have gone a little bit crazy’.
B: During the first six months of planning the business we were jumping between ideas on just about a daily basis. We’d get really excited and passionately tell people about our new idea and then between that point and the next time they asked, we’d already moved between six new ideas. We finally realised it was best to just not say anything.
What’s up with this whole idea of ‘ugly’ bananas? Who decides who’s ugly or not, and why are you guys passionate about saving these not-so-attractive guys?
O: An ugly banana is any banana that doesn’t resemble the stereotypically beautiful banana that you see on supermarket shelves. If you’ve only ever shopped in the supermarket then you’ve probably never seen an ugly banana, but go to the farmers’ market and you’ll find them being sold in amongst their pretty brothers and sisters. Every day more than one million of these ugly (yet perfectly edible) bananas go to waste due to tight appearance regulations by the big supermarkets.
B: That’s more than one million potential pancakes that never see the light of day. Every day.
O: That’s enough to make anyone sad. But when you dig a little deeper there’s actually some pretty pressing issues surrounding this whole thing. Firstly, after hours upon hours of hard work, farmers can generally only sell around two thirds of their crop. This essentially means they have to forgo one third of their potential income.
B: There’s also the environmental issue. When ugly bananas are sent to landfill they rot and emit methane gas. Carbon dioxide is obviously considered a harmful greenhouse gas, but methane is almost 30 times more potent in the atmosphere. The unfortunate fact is that food waste is a vastly overlooked driver of climate change.
So you rescue the bananas from being doomed to death by ugliness. How do they then become your delicious pancakes and where are the bananas coming from in the first place?
O: We have partnered with a farm in Far North Queensland who actually collect the ugly bananas from neighbouring farms and turn them into flour themselves.
B: It’s not exactly easy to find a flouring mill that wants to deal with bananas, so to have found them has been a huge blessing.
What are your top three pancake serving suggestions?
B: The holy salted trinity of Banana, Peanut Butter, and Honey is a diehard classic which sits up there with the breakfast gods. But Oli’s homemade vegan nutella would have to be my favourite, that alongside pretty much anything is a winner.
O: The nutella is just two parts Kara Coconut Cream and one part Chow Cacao chocolate melted together to create a dangerously morish crack-like substance. Tahini and maple syrup is also yummy, I like it because it’s reminiscent of sticky date pudding and it was actually recommended to us by a loyal customer.
Lastly, I’ve been doing my pancake research and the Guiness World Record for largest pancake was set in 1994 in Manchester, UK, with a pancake measuring 15.01 metres in diameter and 2.5 cm deep (it weighed 3 tonnes!) And the record for the most pancake tosses in one minute is held by Australian chef Brad Jolly who completed 140 flips in 60 seconds in Sydney in 2012. Any plans to take on some pancake world record.
B: 15 metre pancake!?!? We only just have enough money to be able to buy our packages and ingredients, let alone make a 15 metre pancake!
O: Maybe we could create our own new world record category – fastest time to complete the Pancake Marathon. You’d have to mix, cook and eat 100 pancakes, and the winner would get a big bottle of carbonated pancake mix to spray over the spectators at the end.