From Mitchell Street to the Farmers Market: How One Bendigo Entrepreneur Is Turning Food Waste Into Gold

Mara Callahan started with a ute, a $4,200 second-hand compost tumbler, and a handshake deal with three cafés on View Street. Two years later, her business, Goldfields Soil Co., is collecting food scraps from 23 Bendigo hospitality venues each week, processing the material at a leased plot on Heinz Lane in Kangaroo Flat, and selling finished compost to market gardeners at $18 per 25-litre bag. She is booked out until September.

The timing is sharp. Across regional Victoria, food-and-organics diversion from landfill has jumped up the political agenda as councils face mounting pressure under the state's organics infrastructure rollout. Bendigo's own City of Greater Bendigo committed in its 2024 waste strategy to diverting 70 per cent of organic material from landfill by 2030. Entrepreneurs who can plug the gap between restaurants generating waste and farmers needing soil amendment are not just doing something virtuous, they are filling a genuine market void.

Callahan's route runs through the core of the central business district twice a week. She picks up from Chez Dore on Williamson Street, The Good Loaf bakery on Hargreaves Street, and a cluster of venues around the Capital Theatre precinct, then swings south toward Kangaroo Flat before the morning peak. The collection fee she charges venues ranges from $60 to $140 per week depending on volume. Most of her restaurant clients say that undercuts what they were paying for general waste removal.

The Compost Economy Finds Its Footing

Bendigo's Saturday Farmers Market at the Showgrounds on Holmes Road has become her primary retail outlet. Callahan took her first stall there in March 2025, selling 80 bags on opening weekend. By May this year she was moving more than 350 bags per market day and had set up a pre-order system through her website. She also has a standing wholesale order with a market garden operation near Axedale that takes 1.5 tonnes of bulk compost per month at a negotiated rate of $310 per tonne.

The Small Business Victoria New Entrepreneur program helped her access $12,000 in matched funding in late 2024 to buy a second shredder and scale the Kangaroo Flat site. She used part of that grant to hire her first casual employee, a University of Bendigo agricultural science student who works 14 hours per week managing the windrow turning schedule.

None of this is frictionless. Callahan spent seven months navigating an EPA Victoria composting facility licence before she could legally process more than two tonnes of material per week. The paperwork, she has said publicly at Bendigo Business Hub workshops on Pall Mall, nearly killed the venture before it found its feet. She now presents quarterly at those sessions to help other operators avoid the same delays.

What Other Small Business Owners Can Take From This

The model has caught the attention of the Bendigo Economic Development Unit, which has flagged circular-economy micro-businesses as a priority sector in its 2026-28 action plan. Three other Bendigo operators are understood to be in early discussions with council about similar organics collection permits, though none have yet progressed to the licensing stage.

Property costs matter here. Industrial land around Kangaroo Flat and Huntly remains significantly cheaper than in Melbourne's fringe suburbs, where AI data-centre development and logistics competition have pushed rents sharply higher over the past 18 months. That gap gives Bendigo-based processors a structural cost advantage that operators in outer Melbourne can no longer claim.

Callahan is negotiating a longer lease on the Heinz Lane site and has flagged to the Bendigo Business Hub that she wants to expand her collection network into Castlemaine and Kyneton by the end of 2026 financial year. Whether the EPA licence extension comes through on schedule will determine that timetable. In the meantime, anyone running a café or restaurant in Bendigo and paying over $100 a week for general waste removal probably has her number by now.