In 2022 I got a call about blueberries. Specifically, about 1.5 million tonnes of them heading for waste. The Oz Group Co-Op in northern NSW had a surplus that had nowhere to go, and OzHarvest Ventures, the social enterprise arm of Australia's leading food rescue organisation, was looking for a way to turn them into something worth drinking.

The question landed with me and Ben Tyler from Kakadu Kitchen at the same time. We'd already worked together on the Native Peach Bellini. We knew how to build something from ingredients that came with a story attached. And the brief for this one was more interesting than most: make a drink that the ingredients deserve.

That's how the Conscious Drink came together. Not from a marketing brief. From a pile of rescued blueberries and a shared view that what ends up in a bottle should matter as much as what goes on the label.

The base is blueberry juice from rescued fruit, diverted from landfill and juiced before it could go to waste. On its own, blueberry makes a pleasant drink. What makes the Conscious Drink interesting is what sits around it: wild-harvested native lemongrass, pepperberry, lemon tea tree, and oldman saltbush, all sourced from First Nations-owned suppliers.

The combination is unusual in the best sense. The blueberry gives you fresh fruit sweetness and depth. The lemongrass lifts it into something aromatic and almost sherbet-like. The pepperberry adds warm spice that sits at the back of the finish. The saltbush grounds everything with a subtle mineral quality that stops the drink from being obviously sweet.

It's lightly carbonated, best served cold in a flute or coupe, and it works in the same moment a glass of sparkling wine would. The occasion it's designed for is celebration. The supply chain it's built on is anything but ordinary.

These numbers aren't marketing additions bolted on at the end. They're structural. The product was designed around them. OzHarvest Ventures exists specifically to create this kind of commercial vehicle for social impact, and the Conscious Drink was their first product launch. The numbers have to work or the product doesn't exist.

The front label was designed by Trentin Rasmussen, an emerging Bininj artist from Kakadu. The artwork depicts a bird eating a blueberry against a background of traditional West Arnhem Land rarrk, the distinctive regional crosshatching style that's specific to this country. It's not generic "Indigenous-inspired" design. It's a specific artist, from a specific place, commissioned because his work belonged on this particular bottle.

That specificity matters. A lot of products in this space use cultural aesthetics without the underlying relationship. Here the relationship came first. The artwork followed from it.

Ben Tyler and I are both alcohol-free. We came to that from different directions and arrived at similar places: a belief that what you drink should do something, that the category can be more than a lesser version of alcohol, and that the ingredients and the people behind them deserve to be visible.

The name Conscious Drink was a deliberate move away from the binary framing of alcoholic vs non-alcoholic. The intention was to make a drink that justified itself on its own terms, not by reference to what it wasn't. The rescued fruit, the native botanicals, the First Nations supply chain, the meals funded, the seedlings planted: none of that is incidental. It's the point.

A genuine thank you to the OzHarvest Ventures team and the broader OzHarvest family for backing this from the start. Building the first-ever product launch for OzHarvest Ventures with Ben Tyler and that team was something none of us took lightly, and the way they brought purpose and rigour to every part of the process set the standard for how this kind of collaboration should work.

The Conscious Drink won the 2024 Hive GameChanger Award in the Food & Drink Business category, recognised for new ideas and practices shaping future food systems. It's been poured at the Sydney Opera House, Capella Hotel, NOMAD Sydney and Melbourne, Rockpool Bar & Grill, the Qantas First Class Lounge, and dozens of venues nationally. The drink stands up in those rooms on flavour alone. The story behind it is a reason to come back.