Founder Story

Jeremy Walker

My story started fresh out of high school, when I took on an apprenticeship with a large farming family in southern Western Australia. At 22, I was given the opportunity to return to my own family’s 6,000-acre blue gum plantation and transform it back into a working property. After years of clearing, rebuilding, and sheer hard work, the farm was running as a full mixed-cropping and livestock operation.

As my farming career grew, I began to understand the unspoken pressure that sits behind food production — a world shaped by weather, markets, inputs, debt, and variables completely outside a farmer’s control. Before long, the property I was running was operating as a fully conventional system, because that’s what the economics demanded and what the industry structure rewarded.

But the deeper I looked, the more I saw the tension: farmers are constantly asked to produce cleaner, healthier food, yet the system often pushes them in the opposite direction. Exploring regenerative and health-focused methods made one thing painfully clear — doing the right thing for people and the environment was the harder, less profitable road. Not because farmers lacked care, but because the system wasn’t built to support or reward them.

That realisation led me to the root of the problem: a lack of awareness. Most consumers have no idea what goes into their food — the additives, the processes, the residues, the ethics, or the realities farmers face. And without that awareness, nothing changes.

This is where Conscious Cooking Collective was born:
To empower consumers with clarity, to shift the marketplace from the bottom up, and in doing so, to reward the good food producers and the farmers willing to take the harder road.

Jeremy’s Property In Green Range, Western Australia