100 Mile Foodie began in 2013 as a Tailored Catering business & Cooking school. The name ‘100 Mile Foodie’ came from my commitment to local food & wine & endeavoring to source as much as possible from within 100 Miles from the business, my home in Somerville on the Mornington Peninsula, Victoria.

  2013 was a time when the number of food miles, carbon emissions & the food chain supply was starting to make noise and many people & businesses started to take action & look at how they could do their part in reducing their carbon footprint. I heard in that year that the average shopping basket travelled 70,000 miles, 100 Mile Foodie was my way of contributing to reducing these numbers & educating as many people as I could about local food & wine through my catering events & cooking school.

  Late 2018 I started working with clients living with a disability, teaching ‘Independent Living Skills’ which encompassed writing a budget for food, writing a shopping list, grocery shopping including going to the deli, weighing fruit & vegetables, speaking to cash register attendants, using the self-serve checkouts, going out for coffee with your friends in the group then returning back to the cooking school & preparing morning tea, lunch, afternoon tea all from scratch then packing up & weighing ingredients for a recipe to prepare dinner on their return home. We also offered 1:1 client support & social groups, it was wonderful learning & socialising for clients living with a disability, all this continued successfully until March 2020 when we closed all the above when the pandemic hit.

  March 2020 saw 100 Mile Foodie dramatically pivot into a ready-made meals business supplying clients who lived with a disability, it was a tough time, but we stayed in business, looked after our clients & staff, and rode the wave until we were able to reopen & see our clients face to face.

  October 2021 saw us reopen fully, I think emerging out of the pandemic was harder than heading into it, restrictions, lockdowns & curfews all took the choice out of ‘what to do’ but venturing out into the ‘free world’, a world which was still very unsure, scared made the decision to leave the safety of your home & socialise very challenging for our clients.

  We purchased the Café in October 2021, well that wasn’t planned, seemed like the right thing to offer my clients, a place to work, to be in paid employment, after all everyone has a job in their life goals & people who live with a disability are no different.

  Work started on the cafe in November 2021 but was stopped so many times by building lockdowns, timber shortages, it was very frustrating.

  We finished the year feeling positive & of course excited that 2022 was going to be the year we opened the café, let’s just set a date & work hard to open.

  Monday 28th March 2022 was open day & what an amazing day it was, clients, staff & customers were so excited, it was a great day & they continued onto today where we celebrate our clients training in a little café, our learning & the many opportunities we have created for not only for our clients but the general public to see that everyone can achieve their goals as long as they are given the opportunity.