The sun on the Sunseeker bag was drawn on the same day the business was named. Not designed, drawn: Luke sketched it the afternoon the two of them decided what they were going to make, sent it to a professional later to tidy up, and it has been on the pack ever since. It is a small detail, but it says something about how this brand started, which is fast, at home, and with a very clear idea of what was missing from the chip aisle.
We sat down with Lenny, who co-founded Sunseeker Snacks with Luke, to hear how it all started. The conversation is below, and so is the story it tells: a gap in a crowded industry, a launch post that was only meant for friends and family, and a small factory in Byron Bay where every bag is still cooked.
Watch: how Sunseeker started
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If the video does not load, it is on our Instagram at @uniquewholefood.
A gap in a saturated aisle
"What we really saw in the industry," Lenny told us, "was that there was no good option. There was nothing that was locally made in Australia. There was nothing using certified organic ingredients." The chip aisle is one of the most crowded in any shop, and Lenny is candid that they knew it. "Even though it was a saturated industry, there was this massive gap that we felt we needed to fill."
The gap is easy to describe once you have read a few bags. Most potato chips in Australia are cooked in refined seed oils, sunflower or canola or a blend, for the plain reason that those oils are cheap and neutral. The potatoes are conventional. The salt is table salt. Sunseeker's answer was a recipe with three ingredients, each one certified organic: Australian-grown potatoes, Australian grass-fed and grass-finished beef tallow, and Celtic-style sea salt. A second bag swaps the tallow for Australian organic extra virgin olive oil, which makes that one vegan. That is the whole range, and Lenny is upfront that it is a short list for now. "So far, only these two. And then, yeah, we've got a lot coming for you."
The post that was meant for friends
Before the first bag existed, they posted about the idea. "We really didn't expect for anyone to see it besides friends and family," Lenny says. People did. "That was a real shock, but it was also really validating to see that what we were doing was something that people actually wanted. So to get that validation before we really started was an amazing thing."
Then came production. "Those first few weeks of production were crazy. It was crazy to really get stuck into it, make the product." The part Lenny keeps coming back to is that they make it themselves: "We're really privileged to be able to actually produce a product in our own factory." The factory is in Byron Bay, and the chips are cooked there in small batches, slowly, at low temperatures, which is the method usually called kettle cooking. We will come back to why that matters.
Why the name
"Luke and myself are sun seekers in every sense of the word," Lenny says. "We love to be outside. We think it's the best thing you can do, and we just wanted to share that ethos with everybody." The bright, slightly retro packaging is Luke's work entirely. "In terms of the branding and the fun branding, I can't take any credit for that. That is all Luke." Which brings us back to the sun drawn on day one: the name and the logo arrived together, before there was a product.
What tallow does to a chip
Tallow is rendered beef fat. Suet is warmed slowly until the fat melts away from the connective tissue and water, then strained and cooled to a solid. In the fryer it behaves differently from a refined seed oil in two ways you can taste.
The first is flavour. Refined seed oils are deodorised and taste of nothing, so the potato and the salt do all the work. Tallow carries its own savoury, roast-potato character, and because it sets as it cools, a thin layer of it firms on the surface of each chip, which is the slightly waxy, rich crunch that people describe as "different" when they try these for the first time. There is a long history here: until 1990 McDonald's cooked its fries in a blend that was 93 per cent beef tallow, and that is the flavour a generation remembers.
The second is how the fat holds up in the pot. Fats with more polyunsaturated bonds break down faster under prolonged heat. Tallow is roughly half saturated fat and most of the rest is monounsaturated, with only a few per cent polyunsaturated, and frying studies have found it deteriorates less over repeated use than the seed oils it is usually compared with. Extra virgin olive oil, the base of Sunseeker's second bag, sits in the same stable camp for a different reason, its high oleic acid content. None of this makes one chip better for you than another, and we are not going to pretend otherwise. It makes them taste different, and it is why a bag of chips can be cooked in a fat with a name on it rather than "vegetable oil".
Low and slow, in batches
A continuous fryer, the kind that runs in a large chip factory, moves thin slices through hot oil at a steady temperature in about three minutes. Batch cooking is the older method. A load of thicker slices goes into the kettle, the temperature drops sharply as the cold potato hits the fat, then climbs back as the water cooks off, over seven to nine minutes with someone stirring. The result is a harder, crunchier, darker chip with the folds and blisters that come from starch left on the surface. That is what "hand-cooked slowly at low temperatures" means on the Sunseeker bag, and it is why no two chips in it look alike.
The bags themselves are flushed with nitrogen instead of air before sealing, which is what protects the fat from going stale without a preservative. The trade-off is a short shelf life, about three months, so buy them to eat rather than to store.
The honest bit about "organic"
Every ingredient in a Sunseeker bag is certified organic, and the label stars each one. The finished product, though, is not yet certified in its own right; the brand says it is working towards that with a recognised certifier. So the accurate way to say it, and the way we say it, is "made with 100 per cent certified organic ingredients". The difference matters to some of our customers, and we would rather be precise than generous.
What we stock
The Organic Grass-Fed Beef Tallow Potato Chips come in a 140 g sharing bag at $11.75. That is not a cheap bag of chips, and it is not trying to be; the potatoes, the tallow and the hand cooking are where the money goes. The extra virgin olive oil version and Sunseeker's jar of slow-rendered beef tallow for home cooking come and go from our shelves as the small batches allow, and both are listed in our Sunseeker collection when they are in.
Allergens are simple: potato, beef fat and salt, with none of the declared allergens in the recipe. The tallow chips are not vegetarian. Check the pack for any "may contain" statement, because we would rather you read it than take our word.
Questions people ask
Are Sunseeker chips gluten-free?
There are no gluten-containing ingredients in either bag. Check the pack for the current statement.
Are they vegan?
The tallow chips are not; tallow is beef fat. The extra virgin olive oil chips are the vegan bag.
Is tallow the same as lard?
No. Lard is rendered pork fat. Tallow is rendered beef (or mutton) fat.
Where are they made?
In Byron Bay, New South Wales, in Sunseeker's own small facility, in batches.
Lenny's closing line in the video was to thank the people who have bought a bag so far, and to promise "better-for-you products in the snack aisle and changing it for the better". We will leave the second half of that to them. What we can say is that the bag on our shelf tastes like a chip made by two people who wanted to eat it themselves. It is online with delivery around Sydney, and in store at Leichhardt and Crows Nest, usually near the front, because it does not last long on the shelf.
