Melbourne brewer, bar face uncertain future after collapse of wannabe hospo king
The Rogue Traders business, which owns more than $10 million in real estate, remains ongoing and has not been placed in administration. Pickett did not respond to calls, texts or emails on Tuesday.
During 2020 and 2021, while most Melbourne restaurateurs faced uncertainty due to coronavirus restrictions, Pickett went on a buying spree.
In mid-2020 he scooped up the shuttered Longrain and its upstairs bar Longsong, as well as the site off Little Collins Street that he opened later that year as Chancery Lane, a plush bistro fitted out with green marble, chandeliers and stone archways.
In 2021, he opened several venues at The Continental Sorrento, including fine diner Audrey's, and in February 2022, unveiled Smith St Bistrot featuring red leather booths, marble-topped tables and a mezzanine reached via wrought-iron spiral stairs.
Pickett has been trying to clear the $11 million Commonwealth Bank debt since late 2023 by selling a property – the $10 million Chancery Lane Bistro – with no luck so far.
According to ASIC, the First Guardian loan was supposed to be paid in June 2023, but that repayment was waived to allow Pickett to restructure the business to repay Commonwealth Bank. There is no reference in ASIC's documents to plans to repay the loan from the First Guardian investors.
It appears Pickett has structured his restaurant business – which includes Estelle in Northcote, Matilda 159 Domain in South Yarra and Pickett's Deli at Melbourne Airport – so that the vast majority are insulated from the investments made by Anderson's funds in Rogue Traders.
Anderson was also involved in the expansion of fast-growing craft beer brewer and taproom operator Fox Friday.
Fox Friday, which owns five venues, including Carwyn Cellars, voluntarily appointed administrators last week.
'Control of Fox Friday Group now rests with the administrators who intend to continue to trade on a business-as-usual basis whilst they pursue going-concern sale options or a recapitalisation through the voluntary administration process,' said administrators Keith Crawford and Robert Smith from McGrathNicol, who have already begun the process of advertising the business for sale.
Carwyn's collapse has sent shockwaves through the craft brewing industry where Carwyn's founders, Ben and Sarah Carwyn, are well known. The pair sold their business, which they founded in 2007, to Fox Friday but the family remained involved in the business.
In an Instagram post last week, Fox Friday co-owners Benn and Sarah Hooper said they intended for the businesses to continue running, albeit on reduced hours and staff. They also apologised to suppliers for the situation they said was out of their hands.
'Unfortunately, we've faced significant financial challenges that have brought us to this point. Our financial lender [the Anderson-overseen fund] could not meet their obligations for our capital projects,' the Hoopers said in the social media post.
'While funding was confirmed, we experienced continual delays extending to March 2025, and now they have been placed into liquidation.'
The Hoopers added they had tried to find new lenders or equity partners.
According to court documents filed by ASIC, Anderson's investment business had been seeking a new lender for Fox Friday and was to have the money repaid. Part of that process would include Fox Friday repaying between $8 million and $10 million of the $28 million loan and then finding a new lender.
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Paediatricians worry too that, under these circumstances, a review of nutrition standards could easily veer into MAHA obsessions, like seed oils (which contain fatty acids that are essential for infant development), instead of focusing on science. Loading For Rhone, part of the appeal of Bobbie was that it was marketed as an outsider to the infant formula industry, putting it in a position to criticise the FDA and other agencies. 'I just need to know that you're going to be an actual advocate in there and that you're not just going to nod your head to whatever they're saying,' Rhone said. But to Modi, infant nutrition is a nonpartisan issue. 'And if what it takes to update nutritional standards is a certain administration, certain voices to create that change, I'm all here for it.'
The Age
a day ago
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‘Betrayal': She built a cult baby business, then RFK Jr came calling
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She has also thrown the brand's weight behind policies and non-profits focused on equity in maternal health, reproductive health and access to paid parental leave. This marketing strategy has differentiated Bobbie from other formula brands and generated a cult-like following. Millennial parents seem especially interested in its nutritional value and are perhaps also drawn to its social media-ready packaging, with its soft colour palette and slogans such as, 'I like it shaken, not stirred'. Modi, a mother of four, is a canny marketer, of both herself and her business. She was named one of Time's women of the year in February and one of Marie Claire's power moms in May. The company reached $US100 million ($156 million) in revenue in 2023 – making it the third-largest formula manufacturer in the United States, holding 4 per cent of that market – and is sold at Target and Whole Foods. A contingent of Bobbie's customers sees an about face in Modi's alignment with Kennedy, a man who has been accused by critics of undermining established science and promoting public health policies that they say put children's lives at risk. 'I'm genuinely sad about this,' one follower wrote on the Instagram post of Modi with Kennedy. Another customer, Allison Rhone, 43, a social media manager at a non-profit, noted that the Instagram caption lacked any context about what she called the 'craziness' of much of Kennedy's agenda. 'That to me is complicity because it makes it all seem normal,' she said. Meghan Novisky, 41, a Bobbie customer and a criminology professor at Cleveland State University, said: 'It almost felt like a betrayal; I felt shocked to see that. It just shatters my trust in them.' In interviews, others vowed never to use or recommend Bobbie again. (The company said it hadn't seen a dip in subscriptions.) But 'what's the potential outcome of not being in that room?' Modi said in an interview. 'Two things can be true at the same time,' she said. 'I don't agree with many of the things that this current administration is doing. It's very hard to watch the dismantling of really important agencies and, specifically within my world, parts of the FDA.' But, she said, she saw value in being in the room with a decision-maker like Kennedy. A 'naive' plan Modi moved from the west coast of Ireland to California for a job at Google in 2006. She planned to stay in the United States for a year or two before moving back to Ireland. Instead, she ended up climbing the corporate ladder and, in 2011, became director of hospitality at Airbnb. She assumed that she would breastfeed her first child, born in 2016, but her plans were upended by a nasty bout of mastitis, an infection of the breast. With a raging fever and a crying five-day-old infant, she walked into a Walgreens at 11pm. 'What am I picking up? 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'You can't, in Europe, use sucrose or table sugar,' she said. 'In the US, we don't regulate that.' Loading Europe also sets different limits for ingredients like DHA (a fatty acid believed to be essential for brain and eye development) and iron. Still, she added, the approaches to making formulas around the world are similar, and the small differences between them are marketed as large gulfs. Formulas are also among 'the safest foods made in the US', Young said. 'There's no perfect formula; there's no poison formula.' Similac, for instance – which Modi weaned her daughter off in favour of the imports – is fed to babies in hospitals, including in the neonatal intensive care unit wards. When, in December 2017, Modi found out she was pregnant again, she quit her job and decided to start Bobbie. 'In my mind,' she said, 'I'm like, 'I got nine months, I will have a better infant formula in the market before he comes.' ' That, she said, was incredibly 'naive'. For starters, there were the Goliaths of the market: the four manufacturers – Abbott, Mead Johnson (acquired by Reckitt), Nestle and Perrigo – which together controlled 97 per cent of the market in 2022. Infant formula is also highly regulated, presenting any new entrant with a labyrinth of hoops to jump through. And, infant formula being about as aspirational as antacid or Band-Aids, there were few eager investors. Most, many of whom were male, would also ask something to the effect of, ' 'Well, what are you planning to do with this?' And point to my very visible pregnant belly,' she said. By the time Modi was 8½ months pregnant, in 2018, she had pitched the idea of a 'European-style' formula to 64 investors. One gave her $US2.4 million in funding eight days before her second child arrived. It would be three more years before she would bring an FDA-approved product to market. Crises and opportunities In 2022, supply chain disruptions and a bacterial outbreak that temporarily closed Similac's plant set off a harrowing nationwide infant formula shortage. Since the brand's inception, Bobbie products had been sold online through a subscription model and were manufactured at a contract facility that also works with other smaller brands. During the shortage, when US store shelves sat bare, parents turned to Bobbie formula, creating a surge in demand that outpaced production at the contract facility. The company had to stop accepting new customers. Loading Modi bought a manufacturing facility in Ohio that began making Bobbie formula last year, allowing it to triple supply. HHS now presents Modi with another opportunity: to fulfil her long-standing goals of updating infant nutrition standards. Kennedy's MAHA agenda has many of the same talking points Modi has been espousing since 2018 – that European formulas are healthier, corn syrup in formula is a villain and regulators need to increase testing of heavy metals that have been detected in formulas made in the US. At the same time, the Trump administration has fired thousands of federal public health workers and researchers, including a committee that tracks bacterial outbreaks in infant formula. As head of the FDA division that regulates formula, Kennedy has named Kyle Diamantas, a corporate lawyer who defended Abbott in a lawsuit claiming that one of its formulas increased the risk of a deadly condition in infants. (Abbott, which lost the case, was ordered to pay $US495 million in damages.) Paediatricians worry too that, under these circumstances, a review of nutrition standards could easily veer into MAHA obsessions, like seed oils (which contain fatty acids that are essential for infant development), instead of focusing on science. Loading For Rhone, part of the appeal of Bobbie was that it was marketed as an outsider to the infant formula industry, putting it in a position to criticise the FDA and other agencies. 'I just need to know that you're going to be an actual advocate in there and that you're not just going to nod your head to whatever they're saying,' Rhone said. But to Modi, infant nutrition is a nonpartisan issue. 'And if what it takes to update nutritional standards is a certain administration, certain voices to create that change, I'm all here for it.'
AU Financial Review
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