We have long held the tradition of making kefir at home for our family. Dad (Farmer Rob) strongly believes in the benefit of fermented foods. They are chock full of good bugs and I remember growing up on sauerkraut, fermented grain drinks and of course, our own homemade kefir.

For the longest time, Dad wanted to make a commercial kefir, but had yet to find the right kefir grains to make it commercially. Around 18 months ago he received an email from a man in Bulgaria by the name of Ivo. Ivo said that he’d spent a lot of time and effort tracking us down because he wanted to find a local farm that makes great dairy products. He explained that he had a culture that would make the best kefir in the world. It wasn’t new, rather it had been around for quite some time. Ivo was certain our Biodynamic milk and his heirloom culture were the perfect match.

Dad promptly dismissed the email as spam and went about his day. But Ivo was persistent and emailed again, hoping to grab his attention. Dad’s a pretty busy guy and Ivo was emailing at the same time as the creation of our BLISS flavoured milks.

He decided to pass the email on to his Quality Assurance manager Trish, who was just as busy, making sure our BLISS was compliant.

And so the email sat, unread, slowly filtering towards the bottom of a very long email list. Ever persistent and confident he was on the right path, Ivo emailed again. I just love what he said:

“Hi Rob,

Did the QA manager say no?”

With the BLISS now done, Trish had room to breathe and she went about rediscovering the email and reconnecting with the plucky, tenacious Ivo from Bulgaria.

Two days later we were requesting samples of the kefir starter to begin our comparative trials. One of Dad’s favourite things to do is create new products and he dived into his kitchen experimentation, trialling a range of different kefir. Ivo was there the whole time, checking in to see how the trials were going and what we thought .

Ivo was right, he did have a pretty amazing kefir culture and it married beautifully with our Biodynamic milk. Dad loved it, our team loved it and now that it is in shops, hopefully some of you guys love it too!

The rest is history!