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Where a business starts and where it finds success can often be two very different places. Sometimes the original vision just isn’t feasible or the world forces adaptation in order to survive. Whatever the case, it’s safe to say the last year has forced the hands of many small Aussie business owners.

One such business is the Aboriginal-owned-and-run food truck-turned cafe, Meat Brothers. It was started by Corey Grech in 2016, who was able to quit his full-time government job in 2019 to put all of his focus on the business. While it really hit its stride at the beginning of 2020, COVID eventually forced Grech into a corner.

While things changed for Meat Brothers as a result, the current iteration of the business is its strongest yet, utilising shipping containers to serve around 400 workers on a Sydney construction site.

The company

Starting off as a business to keep family together and create job opportunities, Meat Brothers began as a Square-powered mobile food vendor with a bush food twist before evolving into the shipping container cafe it is today.

“We went from making pies and attending festivals and markets to now having fully scheduled cafes on construction sites, with sort of longer-term contracts and are planning on setting up our second contract soon with a particular building company,” Grech told Business Insider Australia. “Hopefully, that can extend to not only other building companies but maybe other avenues as well.”

“We used to do bush food as a bit of our core business, and we haven’t exactly shied away from it, but we’ve had to diversify I suppose, with COVID. We’ve managed to turn the business into a bit less of a niche sort of product and a bit more of an easier flexible construction site cafe.”

The challenges

In the beginning, Grech was juggling Meat Brothers with a full-time government job, treating it more as a hobby than a business venture before eventually going all-in.

“I was juggling the two from 2016 to 2019, it was a bit of a hobby on the weekend and three years into it, I pulled the pin on a full-time government job and went full-time into Meat Brothers,” he said.

“Pretty much a year later, we struggled and we sort of turned the corner in early 2020. We started with a three-by-three marquee and a pie warmer to sell all our pies that way, literally just the pie on its own. We then started brewing lemon myrtle ginger beer and I started carting along a little keg fridge and did our pies and ginger beers out of the marquee.”

The next step for Meat Brothers was going mobile with a food truck, which they were able to do with the help of a business loan from Indigenous Business Australia.

“They gave us a bit of support in lots of different ways but the money pretty much built the food truck,” he said. “So I gathered up all that equipment I had and dumped it into a van and we drove that around for a number of months, visiting new festivals and markets and tried pretty much every decent one you can think of, The Rocks Market, Newcastle Farmer’s Market, Blues Festival, some pretty decent ones.”

Throughout the entire process, Meat Brothers was able to stay agile by using Square, which was particularly useful when it came to processing transactions at festivals, all of which was done with a Square Reader and a phone.

“We sold some like 3,000 pies and we did that on an iPhone,” Gretch said.

Just when things started to really hum, COVID hit and robbed Meat Brothers of many opportunities.

“It was a shimmer away from being amazing and then COVID came and we lost about maybe 16, 17 festivals overnight, not to mention the markets were closed,” Grech said. “And it just happened maybe two or three weeks before I’d had conversations with a building site about maybe bringing the van there during the week to try and maximise the output. We’d locked that in, actually, we shook hands on it, me and a particular building company, and they gave us a go.”

It was that building company that offered Meat Brothers the shining light it needed to weather COVID restrictions.

“It was just luck that the construction site at that time could cope with us coming on site like that.”

The adaptation

While the building site contract helped, it didn’t prevent the need for further change to stay afloat.

“We had to sell our food truck because we just couldn’t keep payments up and keep it all going where it was,” Grech said.

They also had to tweak the menu slightly to stay relevant in the location, which meant a little less bush food and more classic staples.

“I think people are going to stick to their lane for a little while,” he said. “We didn’t want it to be plagued with the thought that we had to sell bush food. We want to be an Aboriginal business that does good work.”

“We put out good food and we do good work and we got a high quality of customer service.”

The dream of selling bush food is still alive in Grech, but he’s come to terms with that taking a little bit of time to fully get off the ground.

With a permanent spot on the building site secured, Grech was keen on setting up a shipping container cafe. Eventually, he was able to use the profits from Meat Brother to purchase a 20-foot container from Gumtree.

“Got it, cut a couple of holes in it, fitted it out,” he said. “My brother’s an electrician, so he came and put the lights and power supply in.”

Anything Grech couldn’t do himself or with the help of friends or family, he had done professionally. Once it was fitted out with a commercial kitchen, it was placed where it currently sits, plumbed, powered and ready to go.

The business now uses a Square Register as part of the new shipping container setup, allowing customers to order on Square Online via a smartphone prior to picking up their food — something that helped the team greatly during COVID restrictions.

As for next steps, Meat Brothers is keen on getting its ginger beer into the spotlight.

“We’ve actually just registered another business called Native Botanical Brewery,” Grech said.

“It’s going to handle the ginger beer because no one wants to buy a ginger beer off Meat Brothers. We had to kind of find another tool, another marketing tool, so we registered another business. Then what we’re going to do is put the two together and have a sports bar.”

“The pale ale industry’s had its spike. I think everyone’s getting sick of pale ales, so maybe they can get them to come across to some type of native ale.”

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