Lynchs Hub – A Sign of the Times
Blake Forrester, Founder of Lynches Hub with Dawn O’Neil CEO eWater Systems
Recently the eWater team were ambling along the foreshore at Newcastle and dropped into a cool looking spot to grab a coffee. To our surprise there were eWater spray bottles on the counter, on display. Very cool we thought. We then realised we were at Lynchs Hub, Blake Forrester’s iconic kiosk/café. Complete with an eWater System. And Blake was offering clientele refills eWater to save them money and to reduce their chemical footprint. Intrigued we asked Blake 3 key questions, and here’s what he had to say. (We think it’s well worth the minute it takes to read).
Why did you choose to use eWater?
There's a heap of reasons really but the main two things are as follows:
Our shop is a few meters away from the harbour, we've always been conscious of our chemical footprint and of trying to reduce it.
We make gelato here onsite. When you make gelato there is an unholy amount of sanitation involved. Just in preparing the workspace and machinery for batching a run of gelato (so this is not cleaning or post-work sanitisation, it's just the final sanitation before we start work to ensure that the surfaces, tools, machinery and equipment are safe) we will go through 60-80L of sanitiser. If you're using chemical sanitisers, there is no possible way some of that isn't making its way into people's food so we wanted to find a way of achieving what we needed to in terms of food safety without the chemicals.
What have the results been, what are the benefits?
The results are that I've got more confidence in our food safety and quality. The products that the unit produces are very effective at what they are designed for and much safer than alternative chemical products. There would be very few people who have worked in this industry for any period of time that are not able to describe an injury or incident experienced by them or their co-workers or customers in relation to commercial cleaning chemicals (I can personally recount more than I care to). We definitely still need some chemicals onsite for specific purposes, but we have far less and as a result the workplace is much safer.
We also produce quite a bit of packaged stuff here for retail, small-batch jams and preserves, freeze dried gelato, those sorts of products. An unforeseen benefit of the eWater system is that it has given me a bit more range in the packaging options that I can use as well. I'm not so reliant on heat for sterilising, I can effectively sterilise using eWater and then use lower heat to dry packaging that would be destroyed if made hot enough for long enough to effect proper sterilisation by temperature alone.
What would you say to anybody considering to make the shift from traditional chemicals to eWater
I think I can really only speak to a small business like mine. We are a little family venue, we aren't a huge function centre or industrial style kitchen in a hospital or something. Things would be very different in those types of settings and return on investment would stack up differently. However for us I would say that while you do save some money on chemicals over the life of asset, this not really a cost saving initiative for me from the beginning. That just wasn't what I was thinking about going into it...
For me the eWater system was an investment in sustainability and safety. That's important to our ethos and to our brand at Lynch's Hub. Innovation and doing things differently has also always been important to our brand here as well. We make everything we can onsite from scratch in small-batches with a focus on creativity and quality. In this context the investment in eWater made sense for our venue because its an innovative way to do things better and that's what we have always been about. So if you are about the long game and its important to you to continuously improve and innovate then eWater is definitely something to consider.
To further reduce the chemical footprint, Blake makes his eWater system available to his clientele. For just $5 per bottle, Lynchs Hub provides refills at no additional cost, helping more and more people switch onto to the benefits of eWater.
