1995 - 2000
The summer of 1995 was a scorcher. Chefs across the country sweated it out through service, boxing off their mise en place while Silverchair’s ‘Frogstomp’ blared from greasy kitchen CD players.
In Melbourne and Sydney, upmarket diners were booking tables at Stephanie Alexander’s and Matt Moran’s eponymous restaurants. Brisbane locals were amusing their bouche at E’cco, while Darwin, Perth and Cairns were quietly ahead of the curve, serving authentic pan-Australian and Southeast Asian flavours.
Cappuccinos were hot. Bread was sliced and white. Oat milk wasn’t a thing. And if you were gluten free, you rang in advance to pre-order.
1995 was the year Aussie diners were either dressed in double-breasted jackets, raising glasses of Domaine Chandon in upmarket restaurants. Or they were wearing Stussy pants and Kuta Lines jumpers, piling plates high at Sizzler and ordering loaded potato skins at The Keg.
1995 was also the year Bidfood Australia began its journey.
The last few years of the millennium were a time of growth for Bidfood. They were also a time when new flavours and global influences began weaving their way into the industry. This period would lay the foundations for what we now recognise as modern Australian cuisine.
Ingredients that would shape the next decade of dining became more common across the industry. Harissa, truffle oil, couscous, preserved lemon, pomegranate molasses and semi-dried tomatoes – not to mention the now-staple roquette – made their way from migrant grocers and ethnic restaurants onto mainstream menus, as chefs began to prize authenticity as much as creativity.
As Bidfood grew in those early days – while the next generation of culinary leaders was just being born (sighs from Gen X) – it was also technology that was changing the way we worked just as quickly as ingredients were changing the way we ate. In 1995, we took orders by fax and ran Windows 95 on computers with a whopping 80 MB of storage!
Bidfood’s IT Business Systems & Support Manager, Michelle Wann, who has been with Bidfood Australia since 1996 and was part of the marketing team at the time, remembers just how different things were 30 years ago.
“When I first started, all the marketing material was photographed on film. They’d send us a proof sheet, and then it was a couple of weeks between the shoot and when we actually got the prints back,” said Michelle.
