Legends and Trailblazers 2024: Food Producers, Retailers, Advocates

Ask any of Victoria's top chefs where to find top quality pork and they’ll send you straight to Judy Croagh. The founder and chief executive of Western Plains Pork has worked directly with chefs for more than 20 years, finessing her free-range product to the needs of the hospitality industry while producing pork to the highest ethical standards – and all while working towards a carbon-neutral certification at her farm on the grassy plains between Ballarat and Geelong. You’ll see her work on the plates everywhere from Serai to Etta to Farmer’s Daughters to Navi.  “Judy loves Victoria's hospitality industry, and restaurants love her right back, with Western Plains Pork proudly listed on menus across the state,” says food journalist and broadcaster Wendy Hargreaves. “She’s a legend because she has served Victoria’s restaurants for more than two decades, listening to chefs and delivering the goods long before it was cool to deal directly with farmers.” 

Kariton Sorbetes is one of the shiny silver linings of the lockdown cloud. Chef John Rivera had just left fine diner Lûmé and was bored and underemployed. And then inspiration struck. What if his next move was not straight into another restaurant, but rather ice-cream that channeled his Filipino heritage. And thus the ube halaya gelato, Melbourne’s most famous purple yam fudge gelato with blackberry jam and roasted coconut curds, was born. The side hustle has grown into a mini-empire with four Melbourne shops where you can experience what happens when a Filipino-Victorian chef celebrates his culture with artisanal artistry and a nod to the archipelago’s ice-cream street carts. The mind-expanding repertoire of flavours – durian chiffon with palm sugar jelly, kamote cue (roasted sweet potato with candied chestnuts) and their bandmates – have broadened the horizons of anyone who thought gelato had to carry an Italian passport. John is now also back in restaurants, having opened Askal in the CBD, but Kariton Sorbetes keeps going from strength to strength in the meanwhile. A national launch is now underway, but it remains a very Victorian success story. “If there was any place we were going to make this work, it was Melbourne,” he says. “Melbourne is a city that loves to embrace new things.”