It all started with a few recycled jars filled with homemade and seasonal food at the local farmers’ market. Give it a few years and a lot of figuring out and Cherie Hausler had a range of products being sold by the pallet load to hundreds of stores across Australia. Did we mention there’s also a tv show?
Braiding together a passion for food, media experience and the idyllic rural setting that is the Barossa Valley, Cherie has created a brand that is as authentic as it is delicious when you get your hands on the products.
Aptly named “All the Things” after Cherie was lost for words when trying to describe what she does and her friend explained, “Cherie is just all the things”, the business venture has evolved quickly but organically.
Cherie grew up in the Barossa, surrounded by the wine and food it has become internationally known for. However, her early influences in food were gentle. While her mum cooked everything from scratch – “there was no takeaway back then” – and she started her working life aged 14 in the kitchen at Peter Lehmann Wines, Cherie said there was no major push in that direction.
Cherie left the Barossa for Melbourne, London and Sydney for a career in tv and magazine, writing while also commuting to Bangkok where she co-owns the restaurant, Eat Me. Eventually returning home with her husband to the rundown former rectory they had bought to begin a renovation project.
Cherie was engaged by Australian food legend Maggie Beer as a consultant, a role that was meant to be a few months but turned into 13 years.
At home Cherie had begun mixing tea in an underground stone water tank at the back of the house, creating a company she named Scullery Made Tea. Maggie’s farm shop was to become her first customer.
“At the end of 2017 I started All the Things off the back of 10 years of being at the Barossa Farmers Market with my tea label.
“I had been making cakes, brownies, cookies, sourdough, then I had products in jars with no labels - cashew paste, butter and seasonal stuff like stinging nettle pesto,” Cherie said, explaining how her range expanded beyond tea.
The products evolved as commercial production came into play and now Cherie’s favourite is the stock paste “because I use it everyday” while the handmade vegan camembert and brie cheeses are the most popular among the customers.
With her products now being sold in independent stores across the country, Cherie pitched her products to the two major supermarket chains and got the green light. Creating an exclusive brand for each - “Leftfield Provisions” for Coles and “Vegan Maker” for Woolworths, they now stock her products nationally.
In the meantime, Cherie had ramped up the commercial food production – a process that has been a huge learning curve. Keeping the production in the Barossa town Kapunda (population of less than 3,000) has presented barriers with freight and staff. However, Cherie is determined to make it work.
If this wasn’t enough, when covid emerged in 2020 and things became uncertain, Cherie and some creative friends started producing video content based on recipes.
“We came up with seasonal tables – spring, summer, autumn, winter – and then I would create a menu and it would have three or four courses on it.
“We’d shoot the recipes then have video content, but also place us geographically. I didn’t want to increase anxiety, so there was lots of Barossa countryside, foraging, walking down roads with almond trees blossoming, just to bring a sense a of connection, but also to slow things down a little bit and say don’t forget these are important things and still accessible, we just have to do them separately.
“It was far more impactful than I thought it would be because of that sense of learning a new skill – like making gnocchi - and applying yourself to project cooking rather than a five-minute ‘throw something together it’s a weekday dinner and everyone is busy’.”
All the Things the television show evolved, with Channel 7 willing to air the first season. It was not the highly structured, edited television experience Cherie was used to in her previous career, working on shows like “Pepsi Live”, “Getaway”, “Our Place” and “Today Show”, but an authentic and realistic insight into Barossa life.
The people on the show were Cherie’s friends, it was mostly filmed on her farm and each episode was filmed in one day and delivered the next week.
“We had kind of finished renovating the stable at our place, it still didn’t have running water, but that’s where we filmed.
“Tv is just one of the best ways to share a story, it’s not that it has to be for tv, it’s just content and it happened to land on tv, but in my mind it could land anywhere.
“People love being voyagers and jumping into someone’s life and seeing their experiences. I have so many friends who are doing amazing things in the Barossa, they aren’t high profile celebrities, they are just my friends and I have pulled them in to share that.
“The tricky thing is getting everybody to drop their lives for the afternoon or whenever they’re scheduled to turn up because none of them are working in tv, so they need to get someone to cover the school run.”
The intuitive approach worked, with Channel 7 just wrapping up filming for season two and the first series sold to SBS Food.
Without doubt, Cherie has shown a career and life in rural Australia really can be all the things.