Key points
- Carolyn Creswell bought Carman’s 30 years ago for $1000.
- The business now employs 60 people at its head office with a further 400 in its factories and recorded $114 million in turnover in its most recently filed financial accounts for the year ending June 2021.
- Carman’s has over 150 different products and is stocked in countries around the world.
Carolyn Creswell may be Australia’s breakfast queen thanks to her food business, Carman’s Kitchen, but she certainly knows how to do a long lunch.
Creswell is a regular at French bistro Entrecote in Prahran, and not long after we have settled into the plush velvet banquettes, there’s the ring of the bell of the restaurant’s caviar and vodka trolley.
“I don’t know if it’s for you or for me, but looks like we are going to get the full experience today,” Creswell laughs.
Carolyn Creswell bought Carman’s when she was 18 years old. Credit:Simon Schluter
Our waiter pours us both a small glass of Grey Goose vodka — “French, not Russian,” he explains — and opens a silver-domed bowl to scoop out a “bump” each of caviar which he places on the side of our hands. We are told to eat the caviar carefully off our hands and then follow it up with a swig of vodka.
Creswell is a caviar bump connoisseur and explains that she chose our lunch venue because she is “besties” with Entrecote’s owner, Jason Jones. Their friendship goes back to when one of Creswell’s children was a small baby, and Jones opened a little cafe at the end of her street.
“One day, I came down and he was out drinking red wine in the kitchen,” she says. “He said the chef had cancelled at three in the morning. So I said: ‘Right, I’ll help.’ I waitressed for him and I ran up to Coles and bought more ingredients and then we just forged a friendship.”
The pair share a love of food, and Creswell is a big supporter of Jones, who she says has underestimated himself in the past.
“He never really backed his own talent,” she says. “Whereas I’m lucky I’ve always had sort of the self-confidence to say ‘know what you are good at, know what you’re not good at, try and work to your strengths’.”
It was this self-belief that led Creswell to buy Carman’s when she was just 18 and still studying at university.
She worked for the couple who owned what was then a small muesli business and decided with a friend to buy Carman’s for $1000 each. Two years later, she bought her partner out.
“I never imagined that it’d ever be as big or successful as it is now,” Creswell says.
She made the muesli herself and the big break came when she got Carman’s into Coles. But then she had to fight to keep the supermarkets stocking her products.
“In the early days, you were just hanging in there with every supermarket review, thinking ‘will I make it? Will I get deleted?’,” she says.
It’s 30 years since Creswell bought the business, and it now employs 60 people at head office and another 400 in its factories. It recorded $114 million in turnover in its most recently filed financial accounts for the year ending June 2021.
Creswell started with smoked salmon with creme fraiche and beetroot at Entrecote. Credit:Simon Schluter
Creswell says Carman’s is “going from strength to strength”. She attributes a lot of its success to sweating the small stuff.
“There’s all these multinationals but they don’t have anyone like me going crazy about the attention to detail — ‘that’s the wrong colour … that’s the wrong shade of brown on the peanut butter bar’,” she says. “A business doesn’t happen from one big decision. It’s a combination of 20 decisions you make each day and they form together and it’s all the little stuff rather than the big stuff.”
The coronavirus pandemic was a challenge for Carman’s, with employees working around the clock to keep shelves stocked with product when people started stockpiling food.
“It was all panic buying and you have to remember there was a million more people in Australia than normal because no one was travelling,” Creswell says. “Then no one can go to restaurants, so the big outing was to the supermarket.”
‘They’ve rediscovered the joy of breakfast’: Carolyn Creswell at her company’s Melbourne warehouse.Credit:Luis Enrique Ascui
Creswell says there was a big increase in purchases of more premium products, such as Carman’s breakfast ranges, while sales of lunchbox items such as muesli bars declined.
Then the business had to contend with a lull in sales when people’s pantries were fully stocked because they had bought so much at the start of the pandemic.
Creswell says Carman’s products are not “expandable” items such as chocolate, which customers eat more of if it is available.
Customers didn’t put more muesli in their bowl in the morning just because there was more muesli in the house.
In the wake of the pandemic, buying patterns have normalised but Creswell says sales are up.
“They’ve rediscovered the joy of breakfast,” she says. “People often thought, ‘Oh well, that’s just a chore, and I’ll just grab that and eat it on my way’. And now more people, I think, are actually taking their breakfast and having it at home or at the office.”
Creswell says most people have the same thing for breakfast every day, so once a customer starts eating Carman’s, they are very loyal.
“We wake up and we want to be the best version of us and want to do the right thing,” she says. “We’ll change around a little bit at lunch but stay relatively healthy. And then by about 3.30 in the afternoon, all bets are off and we’ll have anything for dinner.”
Creswell is awarded Telstra Businesswoman of the Year in 2012.
The other unexpected benefit from the pandemic was an expansion of Carman’s product range.
“We worked really hard in COVID because there was nothing else to do, so we have just brought out 31 new products, which is a ridiculous record for us,” Creswell says. “They are probably the most successful things we’ve ever done.”
As with many businesses, one of Creswell’s main challenges now is finding staff, and she is hopeful the recent change in government will lead to a loosening of the immigration restrictions imposed during the pandemic.
“We need more workers, we need to open up immigration,” she says.
Our waiter brings over our steak frites — we’ve both ordered the same dish because it’s the most popular thing on the menu with good reason.
Inspired by the menu at Parisian icon Le Relais de l’Entrecote, the steak is cooked medium rare, sliced and smothered with the restaurant’s secret herb sauce, which has proved to be so popular that you can now buy it to serve at home.
Accompanied by crisp, salty French fries and a bowl of lightly dressed salad leaves, it’s classic French bistro fare served with flair.
“I love working in the food industry as I think you get that sense of how pleasurable food can be and how much joy it can bring you,” Creswell says.
As a mother of four, she has a ready-made product testing panel, although Creswell’s children have been known to swap the food in their carefully prepared lunchboxes with their friends.
“There’s a lot of complexities around what kids eat,” she says. “Because you’re always dealing with the challenges: this one doesn’t eat avocados, and this one has braces, and this one likes to trade their food.”
Entrecote’s classic steak frites with secret herb sauce.Credit:Simon Schluter
Creswell says while she is part of a minority group as a female entrepreneur, her gender was not an issue until she became a mother.
“I’ve worked in a male-dominated industry but I’ve been able to use my gender to my advantage,” she says. “I was able to win the Telstra Business Woman of the Year — that gave me enormous PR and there was no men’s award.”
But once Creswell had children, traditional gender roles were often assumed, even though her husband, Pete, does a lot of the heavy lifting.
The bill from lunch with Carolyn Creswell at Entrecote.Credit:Cara Waters
“My phone goes crazy because all play dates come to me,” she says. “My husband, he’s the one doing the drop-off, and no one ever texts him. There’s Mother’s Day lunches and Father’s Day dinner and pizza nights. A lot of that stuff I’m trying to fight because it brings enormous guilt for working mothers.”
We’re just about to leave when two glasses of complimentary chestnut apple liqueur poured over ice arrive at our table.
It’s something neither of us would ever have ordered but it’s absolutely delicious.
Creswell says her superpower is being able to tell what Carman’s products people eat just by looking at them.
“I went to a wine cellar door the other day and the guy said, ‘I love your bars’,” she says. “I said, ‘I know you eat the chocolate espresso’. A 16-year-old boy that rows? I know he eats the cranberry nut bars.”
She picks me as a Carman’s classic fruit and nut muesli eater and she’s spot on.
“I know what people eat before they tell me,” she smiles. “That’s what you get from 30 years in business.”
THE BILL, PLEASE
Entrecote, 142-144 Greville St, Prahran VIC 3181, (03) 9804 5468, open Sunday-Thursday 12-11pm, Friday-Saturday 12pm-12am.
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