Fast forward 30 years and the company's suite of aroma recovery, extraction and evaporation solutions have found favour with food, beverage and pharmaceutical manufacturers in countries all over the world. Sales and marketing director Leon Skaliotis says focusing on innovation has been pivotal to Flavourtech’s success.

Flavourtech started out as a small, regional business with a specialist mission – how has it evolved since then?

We’re still based in Griffith, but these days the company is not so small. We have 60 staff who represent 23 nationalities, so we’re a multicultural organisation. That has a lot to do with trying to get the right skill sets – process, chemical and electrical engineers and specialist draftspeople. We advertise through Seek and Indeed and get resumes from all over the world, which gives us the opportunity to obtain the very best talent.

We have a UK office based at the University of Reading, managers in Germany, India and Central America, as well as customers in 60 countries, and counting. For the past decade, more than 90% of our turnover has come from export sales.

What’s been the secret to scoring multi-million-dollar contracts with manufacturers all around the world?

Having customers trial our equipment is part of our sales process. We have pilot plants in Griffith, the UK and the US. Customers can send us their products – coffee, tea, fruits – and we’ll process them. That way, they can see the result that comes from using our gentle technologies.

We have a high sales success rate once companies experience the difference for themselves. Often, it’s a hard sell to get the first piece of equipment in, but a year later they’re back, saying ‘we want another one’ because their sales have grown significantly.

You collaborate extensively with Deakin University and the University of Reading. How does that benefit Flavourtech?

Working with academia, we find we can bounce ideas off them and come up with new avenues and thought processes to pursue. That has been a really positive thing that’s helped keep the company on the cutting edge. We’re a bunch of engineers, we’re not flavourists, so we don’t have the depth of knowledge of some of those academics in specialist aspects of food production and technology.

Developing solutions to complex problems is something Flavourtech prides itself on. How do you inspire your team to keep finding ways to do things smarter and better?

We have a ledger of initiatives we think about, talk about and, slowly, prioritise and bring to fruition. That’s something we’re always working on. We’re very attuned to our customers and, quite often, they’ll say, ‘if only we had something that did x’. Our team then has a brainstorm and works out how to actually achieve that. Sometimes, it leads to new technologies.

We have two solutions in train which were born out of requests from customers for something better. So, for us, innovation means listening to our customers and then developing something that can be tried and tested, taken to market and commercialised.

Is everyone in the team part of the process?

Yes. It’s usually the salespeople who bring the ideas back, and they’re mulled over by the design, and research and development (R&D) teams before production gets involved. We have an organisational thought pattern where we keep our minds open to what’s possible when it comes to creating technologies to assist our customers.

Where to next for Flavourtech?

We’re working with Austrade to find distributors to represent us in new territories like Brazil and Russia, we’re putting on more salespeople and our R&D is growing apace. There’ll be new technologies added to the portfolio in the next couple of years, and our factory will need to expand to accommodate that growth. The last three years have been the largest in our history and we’re laying a stable foundation to support further growth in the future.

Australian ingenuity and open-mindedness have turned Flavourtech into a thriving innovation success and one of Griffith's biggest employers of highly skilled professionals.