Most ingredient sourcing in the drinks industry is a logistics conversation. You find a supplier, agree on specs and volume, sign a contract, and move on. What we built with Kakadu Kitchen is not that.

Ben Tyler is a Bininj man who grew up on his mother's Murumburr country in Kakadu National Park. He's the founder of Kakadu Kitchen, a 100% Indigenous-owned company whose purpose is straightforward: share Bininj culture with as many people as possible, through food and drink, so it lives on. When we started talking about a collaboration, the first thing Ben made clear was that the ingredients aren't raw materials. They carry story. They come from specific country. The relationship with that country, and the Bininj-Mungguy peoples' management of it, is what makes them what they are.

I want to be direct about something before going any further: working with Ben and Kakadu Kitchen has been a genuine privilege. Not in the vague, corporate-acknowledgment sense. In the practical sense that we've had access to ingredients, knowledge, and cultural context that we could not have found any other way, and that access came with a responsibility to represent it properly.

The centrepiece of the collaboration is the an-marabula, the native Kakadu peach. It's a lesser-known species related to the an-marlak, the Kakadu plum, and it's cherished by Bininj-Mungguy peoples. When you first encounter it in the field, it doesn't look like much. The skin is fuzzy, similar to a regular peach. The flesh is thin, the fruit more seed than anything else. It looks, honestly, like something that didn't quite develop.

The flavour tells a different story. Earthy, dry, with a subtle tartness. Something like Kakadu plum, but quieter. Less astringent. There's a depth to it that's difficult to describe without tasting it directly, and that depth is exactly what makes it remarkable in a drink.

The an-marabula is harvested just before the first rains of the wet season, in the window between Kakadu's dry seasons. Kakadu has six traditional seasons recognised by Bininj people. The timing of the harvest isn't incidental. It's specific to the plant's cycle and to the land management practices the Bininj-Mungguy peoples have maintained, alongside park rangers, through controlled burning and careful stewardship of the country.

There is no commercial farming operation producing this fruit at scale. You can't order it from a distributor. It exists because the country it grows on has been cared for properly.

The first product from the collaboration was the Native Peach Bellini. A non-alcoholic Bellini built on native peach nectar and Australian sparkling. 250ml cans. Seasonal and limited, because the ingredient is seasonal and limited.

Getting the product right took time. The challenge with an-marabula is its subtlety. You can't push it hard without losing what makes it interesting. A Bellini format made sense because the sparkling base lifts the flavour without overwhelming it, and the traditional pairing of peach and sparkling gave people a reference point for something genuinely unfamiliar.

The result is a drink that tastes like the country it came from. That's not marketing language. It's what good botanical sourcing produces when the ingredient is treated with the care it deserves.

The second product was a Green Ant G&T. Distilled juniper and black pepper, with native green ants adding a citrus-sherbet note that is impossible to replicate with any farmed or synthetic ingredient. Same format. Same ethos.

Ben used to make drinks with native plums and green ants as a kid on community at Patonga, not for any commercial reason, just because that's what you did with what was around you. There's a line from that kid mixing drinks in Kakadu to the canned product that exists now. That continuity matters.

A lot of brands talk about native botanicals. The category has genuine momentum, and with it comes a predictable pattern: brands identify an interesting ingredient, source it through whatever path is available, and use the cultural association as positioning without the underlying relationship.

Working with Ben is different in ways that aren't always comfortable. Ingredient availability is not guaranteed. Volumes are constrained by what country produces in a given season, not by what a sales forecast requires. The timeline is not yours to set. And there are ongoing obligations, to represent the sourcing accurately, to ensure the collaboration benefits Kakadu Kitchen materially and visibly, not just as a line in an acknowledgment.

None of that is a complaint. It's what genuine collaboration with First Nations producers looks like. The constraint is also the point: the scarcity and specificity of the ingredient is inseparable from its value. You don't get one without the other.

For brands or venues considering this kind of sourcing relationship, the starting question is whether you're prepared for that dynamic. If you need guaranteed volume at a fixed price on a fixed schedule, this is the wrong category of ingredient. If you're building something where the provenance and the story are core to the product, it's worth understanding properly.