Heritage and Traditions - a family history
Bio's, ay? A bit annoying... but stories and context also bring things to life and this is a living business (both invisible to the naked eye and larger than life)...
I'm Sharon Flynn, and I'm six feet tall with Dutch heritage running through me. When I travel to the Netherlands, I feel at home in a way I don't anywhere else - l like to think I Iook Dutch.. I feel Dutch. I am actually more similar in my looks to my father in reality - but within - I identify as Dutch.
My mother, Anje Zuidema, was five years old when she was brought to Australia. Like many, she grew up navigating being different in post-war Australia - foreign, other, not quite belonging. Kids teased her about her name. So she changed it - became Anne Kathleen Green. A small child trying to survive the schoolyard, still translating things for her parents at home.
Then, when she was sixteen, her father became so homesick that the whole family sold everything and returned to the Netherlands. But it wasn't home anymore. They'd been gone too long, changed too much. After just over a year, the family came back to Australia, and had to start again.
She'd lost her homeland twice - once when she left it at five, and once when she tried to return at sixteen and felt she didn't belong there either. (Plus she was already in love with my Dad and wanted to come home to him).
By the time she had children, the Dutch language had faded, the food traditions had disappeared. She'd absorbed the message - as so many immigrants did - that her heritage was somehow less, that Dutch food wasn't appealing, that being European was something to downplay rather than celebrate. When I was sixteen - the same age she'd been when she returned to Holland - and going away as an exchange student, she actively suggested I not go to the Netherlands. I went to Denmark instead. She didn't make the connection that it might be valuable for me to learn her language or meet her family. Holland was boring, lesser. Not worth my time.
My father is from the Barossa Valley, a region with strong German heritage where wine-making and European food traditions have always been part of the landscape. Yet somehow, even with fermentation culture embedded in both sides of my family history, I didn't grow up connected to these traditions. I do feel connected to Adelaide. :)
But there's something else that happened to that generation, and it wasn't just about displacement. Supermarkets were new. Packaged food represented progress, modernity, wealth. To my mother's generation, being able to buy things meant you'd made it. Making things yourself - fermenting, preserving, baking from scratch - that was what you did when you were poor, when you were fresh off the boat, when you hadn't yet arrived.
The irony is that now it's completely reversed. Making your own bread, fermenting your own vegetables - these are markers of privilege, education, having time. Buying processed food is what you do when you're time-poor. The cultural meaning flipped entirely within a generation.
So not only did we lose food traditions through displacement and assimilation - we lost them because they represented the old country, the hard times, the poverty we were trying to leave behind. My mother wasn't just hiding her heritage. She was, in her mind, moving forward.
Fermentation wasn't something that was handed down to me through my family -(although I believe it is something we all inherit) - it was something I had to discover. Making sauerkraut turned out to be a way of honouring my 'Dutchness', of understanding the culture my mum had learned to suppress as a small child. It kind of pieced together an identity; what might have been part of us, but wasn't, healing something that had been lost across generations - not just through displacement, but through the complicated meanings we attach to food, labour, and belonging.
opening up...
As a teenager, I lived in Malaysia for a while - a complete flavour awakening. Spicy, fishy, fermented flavours that didn't exist in my upbringing. My senses and palate were opened to completely different food culture in and around Kuala Lumpure and through our various travels.
At sixteen, I was an exchange student in Denmark, living in an old farmhouse in Hjordkær. They had a stone cold room where they kept their food, often dairy ferments - cheeses, buttermilk, traditional preserves. What struck me wasn't just the food itself, but the complete comfort and confidence they had with these old methods. No fuss, no fear. The family had lived in that house for generations and this was every day for them.
Japanese Years
A few years later I moved to Japan. First at a ski resort, then in Ikebukuro as a nanny, then living at the base of Mt. Takao. A local gathering of grandma gardeners next to my apartment taught me tsukemono and miso-bed pickles. I learned to make mochi at temples, to crave nattō, and gain an appreciation of the patience and sense of time applied to food when I was mostly only used to that idea in the form of wine or beer.
When I worked as a nanny, out of necessity and a competitive spirit I learned to make proper bento boxes - the care that goes into preparing seasonal, beautiful, nourishing food for 4 year olds was astonishing to me. We also had to make their book bags and things together so they would appreciate the care when they were not at home for the fist time. These things were so new to me but really impressed upon me when I became a mum. The mother of the house worked full time in a high pressured job but would come home and sleep with her youngest. In Australia we were all about letting them cry themselves to sleep and separation. Here, it was gentler.. and the city was also safe and gentle.
Japan shaped how I understood food, how I moved through the world as a young woman. The attention to seasonality, the respect for ingredients, the understanding that food preparation is a form of care - all of this became foundational.
I left for a few years, then returned in my early 30's, by now with 2 daughters in tow. Those two years back in Tokyo, navigating being be a mother in downtown Tokyo, enjoying again the Japanese food culture of my 20's, reinforced so much. I made bento boxes for my own daughter who started school there. Those weren't received so well when we moved to Chicago... I do love Chicago. And would move back in a heart beat but - I guess I got culture shock.
Chicago, making bread
After nearly a decade immersed in Japanese food culture, I found myself kind of frightened by the American food system. We lived in Highland Park, a wealthy neighbourhood with strong Jewish food traditions - pickles, gravlax, smoked fish, beautiful briskets at the deli. The cultural food heritage was there. I loved it. They had a few fabulous farmers markets downtown. My neighbour Debbie was a vego. and up with those things which was a relief. But her kids were away at uni. and things had changed since they were little..
The daily reality of the food culture felt dystopian to me. Brightly coloured processed foods marketed to kids, given to them at school even! School lunches that were not nourishing. A food system built around convenience and profit rather than health. And so many kids with so many ailments, I have to admit to being alarmed. So much wealth - yet not really enjoying what I thought were actually the best things in life.
I had Lucia in Chicago - and when shared my thoughts with my doctor he made an observation that stayed with me: the same problems were occurring across class lines. Wealthy families were giving their kids junk food because parents were busy and kids wanted it - and what the kids wanted came from TV advertising and each other. Parents with less money were doing the same, perhaps out of necessity - they were working multiple jobs, exhausted, and processed food was faster and easier, their kids also wanted what everyone else had. This is going to sound judgy of me and truly it isn't so much a judgement but it was... an elephant in the room for me.
The wealthy kids had nannies but quite unavailable parents. The less wealthy kids were raising themselves on television while parents worked. Different circumstances, same outcome: children eating highly processed food, disconnected from real food and the people who should be feeding them.
It was a uniquely modern problem that cut across everything I imagined I knew and understood about class and food access.
I started reading everything I could find about the American food system, trying to understand how we'd arrived here. Food politics, industrial agriculture, nutrition science. I was already making cheese and baking sourdough - for my own entertainment and curiosity - but I hadn't understood them as part of the same process.
I found Sandor Katz's Wild Fermentation around about then. The revelation wasn't that I should start fermenting - I already was, it was that cheesemaking, sourdough, pickling, all of it was fermentation. They were the same fundamental process, just applied to different ingredients. Katz gave me the framework to understand what I'd been doing.
I dreamt about learning from him directly as he spoke of his intentional community which sounded so romantic and ideal. Little did I know that years later, I'd make the pilgrimage from Melbourne to Tennessee to do solidify that.
It was only later, in Brussels, that I'd make the second connection - that all these ferments I'd been making were not only about reclaimiing our food but intimately connected to gut health and healing. They were in fact, a life force of their own.
Seattle
We moved to Seattle, (loved it there too) and fermentation shifted from interest to necessity as I joined a CSA (Jubilee Farms) and suddenly had boxes overflowing with seasonal vegetables. I realised I had better preserve this abundance, or I'd be supplementing from the supermarket next season, which wasn't really the point, and far from ideal.
I was still on my cheesemaking phase. Bread baking. Pickling a little here and there and fermenting when the abundance called for it. It now made more sense to me - delicious food - a hobby, a tinkering with a life force.
Brussels (and my little sprouts gut)
Then came Brussels - what a fabulous time; a gift in many ways - incredible food culture, amazing beer traditions, farmers markets with beautiful bread and cheese and wine from all over Europe. Friends on tap at the International School. My kitchen was small, and I as excited by the European food culture - so mostly I just bought, perused markets and enjoyed making meals rather than preserving anything.
Then my youngest daughter, age four, became seriously ill. Months of high fevers and unexplained weight loss. Doctors couldn't diagnose it. Finally, someone suggested that months of different antibiotics could had destroyed her gut bacteria. The solution was to put them back in - how? Fermented foods!
Suddenly, everything I knew about fermentation - various techniques, traditions, understanding flavours - had a completely different purpose. This wasn't about preserving abundance anymore, or honouring cultural traditions, or creating beautiful food. This was about being able to play a part in healing - it gave me a job to do and hope that something would give her that little boost she needed to get back to herself.
We moved back to Australia, and as a newly solo parent of three, out came everything from everywhere we'd been and every. hobby I'd had: miso soup, nattō, yogurt, pickles. I discovered milk and water kefir through a fellow school mum. My daughter transformed. She went from craving simple carbohydrates to waking up wanting sour foods. Her appetite, her energy and her little terrific, lively spirit returned.
The connection between gut health and living foods was real. Until then, fermentation had been about flavour, tradition, preservation. It was another form of home made food. But after Brussels, it became essential - life-giving in the most literal sense.
I became evangelical about that. New friends visiting my kitchen of bubbling jars would leave with bottles of kefir and jars of kraut. Some wanted to pay for them!
The Fermentary days
The Fermentary sprang from necessity - "accidentally on purpose," as I like to say.
I knew nothing about business and couldn't access (nor did I even thing about) funding as a pretty much sole parent, nor did I really set out to make this a business to begin with. Demand did that - word spread quickly. Within months of placing jars in our local Woodend health food store (trading for organic food credits), orders came from Alla Wolf-Tasker at The Lake House, Andrew McConnell, and Sydney cafes.
I thought: there are bakeries, butchers, cheese mongers - where are the fermentaries? I wanted to be exactly that.
I moved from hand-grating cabbage in my kitchen to a borrowed space in a winery - to an even bigger space in an old abbattoir filling it with life in a place that had recently been doing quite the opposite.
The business grew alongside the cultural shift happening around fermented foods.
When I started in 2012, people would ask "Why would I buy sauerkraut?" and "I don't really eat that... maybe on a sausage now and then..".
Now, in 2026, they ask "How should I eat it?" That evolution has obviously come from the recent research in gut-brain connection and that research keeps growing. People understand they should be eating fermented foods - and that might be the only place they'll get the essential invisible life force from - the science has caught up to traditional wisdom.
So the question has shifted from education about what fermentation is, to education about how to integrate it into daily life.
How do you actually get that tablespoon of living food into your day when you're busy, when your kids won't eat it, when you're not sure what it goes with?
That's become my focus - not just making exceptional ferments, but helping people understand how to use them. Making it delicious and easy enough that it becomes habit rather than chore.
The awards followed along the way, as it usually happens - especially early on : delicious. magazine's Best New Product (2015), Outstanding Artisan (2017), gold medals for kraut and water kefir, MFWF Legend for Food Advocacy and Production.
I made that pilgrimage to Tennessee and studied with Sandor Katz - the dream I'd had back in Chicago finally realised. I learned koji cultivation in Kyoto. I've made many trips to Korea and spent time in Korean enclaves of Japan, learning about kimchi and makgeolli techniques from the people who've been making them for generations. The Korean Embassy and Cultural Centre invited me twice to teach at their festivals, and Korean magazines have featured my work. I travelled to Java to learn tempeh and jamu from Indonesian women who'd been making them for generations. We have also brought Nancy Hachisu, David Asher and Sandor Katz here to run workshops, even organising an Australia wide tour with Sandor.
My first book, Ferment for Good, became a bestseller in 2017. It's now in its third print and available in Italian. Wild Drinks followed in 2023 and because of that have been on numerous podcasts, tv shows, radio and magazine articles. Sounds like I'm showing off now...however I am a rookie in all of this and have learnt so many things - awful things too - about people and how they change in business - how to be a business and what that comes with. It's been a huge 14 years and I'm very grateful for all of the help and the support and the lessons along the way. But I admit I could have done a much better job if I'd known more about business, not just fermenting.
Our gorgeous shop -
In 2021, I opened a retail shop in Fitzroy North - a space to teach, create, and connect with people face-to-face. My daughters worked there, all 3! and the relationships with customers became, honestly, a very beautiful part of the whole thing.
When the lease ended in December 2024, we chose to close the shop and refocus on what we do best: making exceptional fermented foods and teaching people to make their own. The Fermentary now supplies independent retailers across Australia and Singapore through strong distributor relationships.We also run an online store from this website - (run by me and Jeff) and I think we've found our sustainable rhythm.
After 14 years, I've learned that passion and the less enchanting aspects of running a business must coexist. You can't just make beautiful kraut - you also have to navigate regulations, manage distribution, compete with corporations. This shift is about finding equilibrium: sustaining the passion while sharing these life-giving foods with as many people as makes sense, keeping the business human-scale and manageable.
What We Believe
The Fermentary's approach is simple: the best way to get living ferments into people's lives is to make them delicious. We've expanded our range so you can match one of our ferments to almost any meal - making it easy to get that crucial tablespoon of beneficial bacteria into your day.
What makes us different? We're wild fermenters. No synthetic starter cultures, no shortcuts. Just quality ingredients and time - which we believe is the most important ingredient, and the one in shortest supply in modern food production.
We're here to help in two ways: through our range of ready-to-eat ferments for people who want someone to make it for them (I get it - time is short, we can't do everything), and by providing the cultures, ingredients, and knowledge you need to ferment at home. Home fermentation is easier and more affordable than most people realise. Good sauerkraut needs just salt and cabbage.
Someone's got to make the ferments. We're here for that - for a cultured gut, for keeping traditional knowledge alive, for bringing wild, slow, delicious fermented foods to your table.
Thanks for being part of this community.
—Sharon
See where to find us: [Stockist list]
Learn to ferment: [Workshops & Resources]
Read more: [Gut Health & Fermented Foods] | [The Science of Fermentation]
