Get Gutsy With Carla: Why I Started A Fermentation Plant

By Carla Oates

When I first launched The Beauty Chef back in 2009, my goal was to shift the paradigm of the beauty industry and spread awareness for the importance of gut health for beauty, immunity and overall wellbeing.

But aside from creating nourishing inner beauty products that deliver transformative results, one of my greatest goals was to also develop and formulate our products in our very own manufacturing plant. While this vision took over a decade to come to fruition—and more than five years of hard work, late nights, early mornings and relentless work with our team of microbiologists to manage the transition from our network of Australian manufacturing partners to a new state of the art and brand-owned bio-fermentation plant in Sydney—this accomplishment remains one of my greatest career achievements and something I am so proud to share with our community.

Here’s everything you need to know about the project and why it plays such an important role in The Beauty Chef brand…

Why We Built Our Own Bio-Fermentation Plant

Without a doubt, what sets The Beauty Chef apart is that right from day one, we pioneered the inner beauty industry—setting the standard for products that delivered real, tangible results. Our philosophy that ‘beauty begins in the belly’´® also underpins everything we do and it’s this innate understanding of how gut health influences everything from our skin to our immunity and overall wellbeing that drives us to innovate at every opportunity. While from the beginning our unique Flora Culture™ bio-fermentation process has always allowed us to deliver probiotic-rich wholefood supplements, we have had to rely on our external manufacturing partners to execute this process. And this is fundamentally why it has always been our goal to build our own fermentation plant so that we can influence and control this process at every step. 

While fermentation is an art, for us it is also a science (supercharing our ingredients and making nutrients more bioavaiable) and by having our own team of microbiologists on the front line, we are able to continue to be at the frontier of creating advanced, naturally probiotic nutritional supplements. Furthermore, it also provides us with a competitive advantage in the market in terms of speed, quality, efficacy and management.

Better Than Ever

The Beauty Chef has always created powerful probiotic formulas but now, in our new purpose-built plant in Sydney, we are able to have a greater level of control of the process—from start to finish. Our team of microbiologists can integrate the latest scientific research into every step and ferment probiotic bacteria to their peak concentrations, retain the beneficial bacterial metabolites (postbiotics) and use the enzymes produced by the bacteria to improve the digestibility and available nutrition of the wholefoods being fermented even further. Because we can essentially ‘hold the hands’ of our bacteria at every point along the fermentation journey, we can therefore influence, tweak and refine the process to truly supercharge our formulas—controlling everything from the temperature, oxygen and pH of each fermentation, even checking in on it in the middle of the night to ensure we’re getting the optimal potency and benefits from every single ingredient.

Our SUPERCHARGED formulas are undoubtedly better than ever and aside from enjoying the delicious taste and benefits that you already know and love—you can now be assured that we are supporting your overall health, immunity and wellbeing even more with truly bioavailable powders and elixirs containing an abundance of gut-loving probiotics and postbiotics.

Carla X