“I’ll tell ya what,
I’ll do my best.”
THE JOURNEY
OF
AIDAN MULKERRINS
From picking grapes at twelve in Aldinga Beach
to building Bicol’s farm-to-table future in the Philippines
Every job. Every town. Every lesson.
The story behind Nana Bambi’s.
Sometimes it’s too hard to explain.
This is not a CV. Those documents exist — they’re attached if anyone needs them. This is the other story. The one that doesn’t fit in a two-page template. The one that starts with a kid on the beach in South Australia who left school at fourteen and spent the next thirty years doing every job he could find, in every corner of the country, learning something at every single stop.
Most people plan a career. Aidan Mulkerrins lived one — sideways, upside down, across state lines, through kitchens and factories and vineyards and outback pubs and pearl farms and wilderness lodges and fuel depots and building sites and the back of a tour bus on the Pacific Highway at two in the morning with forty backpackers asleep behind him.
Every one of those jobs left something behind. A skill. A connection. A way of solving problems that you don’t get from a classroom. And now, all of it — every single piece — is being assembled into something that didn’t exist before: a vertically integrated farm-to-table food production and distribution company in the Philippines, built from his family’s land in Bicol, named after his mother-in-law — a midwife who spent thirty years riding ponies into the mountains to vaccinate children.
He’s tired now. He’s done chasing. He just wants to share what he’s learnt from it all, sit in his garden, and listen to the birds. But first, here’s how he got there.
That life no longer survives much in Australia anymore. Some of the smaller towns are OK, but nothing beats those days.
Aldinga Beach sits at the bottom of the Fleurieu Peninsula in South Australia, where the Adelaide plains end and the vineyards and farmland begin rolling south toward Cape Jervis. In the years Aidan grew up there, it was a small town in every good sense of the word — a beach community surrounded by farms, full of life and adventure, where everyone knew everyone and kids grew up outdoors.
The beach was the backyard. The farms were the playground. The neighbours were the safety net. It was the kind of place where a twelve-year-old could walk into a vineyard and start picking grapes and nobody thought twice about it — because that’s what kids did. You worked. You helped. You were part of the community, not separate from it.
That sense of community — that small-town, everyone-pitches-in, doors-unlocked feeling — is the thing Aidan carried with him through every town and every job that came after. It’s also, whether he planned it or not, exactly what he’s now building on a farm in Bicol. Nana Bambi’s is not really a business plan. It’s Aldinga Beach, replanted in the Philippines.
Age 12 — The Vines
First job. Picking grapes in the vineyards around Aldinga and McLaren Vale. Bent over in the rows, learning that money comes from physical work and that the sun doesn’t care how old you are. The vines would become a recurring theme in Aidan’s life — he’d come back to them again and again over the years, whenever he needed fresh air and honest work to clear his head. There was always something about the rhythm of it: the outdoor air, the repetition, the simplicity. No office politics. No KPIs. Just you and the vine and the bucket.
Age 14 — The Recycling Centre and the End of School
Two things happened at fourteen. Aidan left school to become a bricklayer — mixing mud and laying courses while other kids his age were doing maths homework. And he started working weekends at a recycling centre near Aldinga. That recycling centre would become a second home for the next six years.
Every Saturday, from fourteen to twenty, he was there. Sorting, processing, handling materials that most people considered rubbish. But here’s the thing about spending your teenage years in a recycling centre: you learn, at a bone-deep level, that nothing is actually waste. Everything has value if you know what to do with it. Plastic, metal, glass, paper — it’s all just material waiting for someone to see what it can become.
Thirty years later, that exact philosophy drives the Bambis feed mill in Ragay. Copra meal — waste from coconut oil pressing. Rice bran — waste from rice milling. Fish scraps — waste from the fishing boats. Vegetable culls — waste from the produce that didn’t make grade. All of it gets processed into balanced livestock feed using formulas that Aidan designed, using 100% local Bicol ingredients, with zero imported soybean meal or synthetic premix. The recycling centre kid grew up to look at agricultural waste and see animal protein.
Age 15 — Hungry Jacks — Five Dollars an Hour
Retail Certificate II. Hungry Jacks. Five dollars an hour. Still working weekends at the recycling centre. At fifteen, he was holding down two jobs and learning how a food operation actually runs from the inside: stock rotation, prep systems, speed of service, waste management, customer flow, shift rostering. Fast food is not sophisticated cooking, but it is an incredibly efficient logistics system. Every Hungry Jacks in Australia runs on the same principles that Bambis will use to dispatch orders from the Ragay operations office: standardised product, predictable demand, assembly-line processing, rapid dispatch, nothing gets wasted.
Age 16–17 — The Factory Floor
Full-time at the recycling centre at sixteen. Then at seventeen, a walk-on at Matt’s in Lonsdale — a rubber manufacturing plant. This is where the real industrial education happened, and it happened fast because Aidan didn’t stay in one department. He worked every single station in the factory: the rubber mill, the crill, the calander, the ovens, and logistics.
He saw raw material come in one door, get processed through multiple stages, and leave as finished product out the other door. He learned that a factory is not a building — it’s a flow. Raw materials in, processing stages in sequence, quality checks at each stage, finished goods out, waste recycled back into the system. That’s exactly how the Bambis hub at Ragay works today: raw feed ingredients arrive from the circuit, get milled, mixed, fermented, and pelletised; livestock arrive on the hauler truck, get held in pens, slaughtered, butchered, vacuum-sealed, blast-frozen, and loaded onto the reefer at three in the morning. One continuous flow. Aidan didn’t study industrial process engineering. He lived it on the factory floor at seventeen.
Then he got bored. Went back to the vines. Outdoors. Fresh air. The pattern was already established: learn everything a place can teach you, then move on.
Age 18 — The Timber Yard and Building Houses
Right next door to the recycling centre — his second home — was a timber yard. The people there knew him. They’d watched him grow up sorting bins on the other side of the fence. So they showed him what to do with timber: framing, structural work, how to read plans and turn raw materials into buildings.
At eighteen, Aidan was building houses. Not assisting. Building. The bricklaying from fourteen, the timber knowledge from the yard, the physical work ethic from the vines and the factory — it all stacked together. He understood how structures go up, how materials behave, how to work from drawings, and how to manage a building site.
Years later, he’d go back to construction in South Australia, framing commercial and residential buildings for Kym Clarke Constructions and Elite Building EP, working toward his Certificate III in Carpentry. The timber yard kid became the carpenter who understood structures from the ground up. And when Bambis needs to build a slaughter facility, a feed mill, a cold storage room, or modify a shipping container into a satellite depot — the bloke designing it has been building things with his hands since he was eighteen.
I watched. I learnt. And I started to cook.
Age 20 — Ayers Rock Resort — The First Big Move
Up until now, every job had been within driving distance of Aldinga. The vines, the recycling centre, the factory, the timber yard, Hungry Jacks — all South Australia, all close to home. Then at twenty, Aidan packed up and drove to the centre of the country. Uluru. Ayers Rock Resort.
He started as a steward — the kitchen hand, the lowest rung in the hierarchy. Washing dishes, cleaning benches, prepping vegetables, carrying stock. But he did what he’d always done: he watched. He watched the chefs work. He watched how a commercial kitchen operates under pressure — the timing, the coordination, the hierarchy, the controlled chaos. And he started to cook.
The resort was his introduction to hospitality at scale. Not a Hungry Jacks counter but a multi-venue resort operation serving international tourists in the middle of the Australian desert. Stock management with supply lines that stretched hundreds of kilometres. Menu planning for thousands of covers a week. Staff accommodation, staff dynamics, the intensity of remote-area hospitality where the nearest backup is a five-hour drive away.
Age 21 — Barrocco, Perth — Where It Got Serious
From the red centre to the west coast. Perth. Northbridge. The corner of Newcastle Street. Barrocco — a big, bold, beautiful Italian restaurant.
This was the real kitchen education. Not resort volume cooking but proper restaurant work: pasta made fresh, sauces built from scratch, plates that had to look as good as they tasted. Italian cooking at its core is about respecting ingredients — letting the quality of the produce speak rather than hiding it under technique. That lesson stuck. The Bambis café in Daet is being built on the same principle: grass-fed meat, farm-fresh vegetables, free-range eggs. Simple food, honestly prepared, sourced from within kilometres of the kitchen.
Darwin, and Everything After — The Kitchen Circuit
After Perth, the moves came faster. Darwin — cooking Chinese food, learning wok technique and a completely different approach to flavour, speed, and heat. Then pearl farming — because why not? Then back to Ayers Rock Resort for a second stint, because the outback had unfinished business. Then home to Adelaide and a restaurant gig in the local area. Then the Murray Princess — cooking on a paddle steamer cruising the Murray River, feeding passengers while the riverbanks slid past the galley window.
Then Darwin again. And this is where the sheer volume of experience starts to become almost comical in its breadth:
The Travelodge. The Frontier Hotel. The Dolly O’Rileys. Lasrama Hotel. Point Stuart Wilderness Lodge. Humpty Doo Hotel. Parap Raging Bull. Darwin River.
Each one a different kitchen, a different menu, a different boss, a different crowd. Some were fine dining, some were pub grub, some were middle-of-nowhere roadhouse cooking where you served what the supply truck brought that week and made it work regardless. Every venue taught him something: how to manage a kitchen under pressure, how to control stock, how to roster staff, how to build a menu around what’s actually available rather than what you wish you had.
That last point matters. In Bicol, you don’t cook with what you can order from Sysco. You cook with what the truck brings from the circuit that morning. Every chef who’s worked in a remote Australian kitchen understands this instinctively. Aidan has worked in more remote kitchens than most chefs will see in a lifetime.
The Circuit Widens — ALM Marketing to William Creek
Then it wasn’t just kitchens anymore. ALM Marketing. Australian Air Express. These weren’t hospitality jobs — they were logistics, distribution, commercial operations. The skill set was expanding beyond cooking into the systems that support cooking: how product moves, how supply chains work, how you get the right thing to the right place at the right time.
And still the hospitality continued, now reaching across state lines:
Daily Waters Pub (Northern Territory) — one of the most remote pubs in Australia. The Highway Inn. Then Green Island, Queensland. Airlie Beach, Queensland. Cunnamulla, Queensland — deep western Queensland, red dirt and cattle country. Byron Bay, NSW. Port Noarlunga Hotel back in South Australia. William Creek, SA — population roughly twelve, sitting on the edge of Lake Eyre, the driest place on the continent.
And somewhere in all of that, he helped a one-armed bloke open a pizza shop. Because that’s what you do when someone needs a hand — even if they’ve only got one.
Byron Bay — Tours, Aquaponics, and Head Chef
Byron Bay became a base for a while, and in typical fashion, Aidan didn’t do one thing there — he did four.
He drove tour buses for Loka Tours and Stray Australia, running the entire east coast route from Sydney to Cairns. Booking accommodation, managing itineraries, handling international backpackers, keeping a logbook, driving interstate, and being part tour guide, part bus driver, part travel agent, part babysitter for forty young travellers who’d never seen a kangaroo before. Then Whirlwind Tours — day tours around Northern NSW. The tourism and customer service experience would later inform how Bambis interacts with its community: visible, approachable, always explaining, always welcoming.
He worked at Flogardens as a trade assistant, where he built and installed aquaponic systems — growing edible plants in symbiotic relationship with aquatic animals. This wasn’t just landscaping. This was closed-loop agricultural technology: fish waste feeds plants, plants filter water for fish, nothing is wasted, everything cycles. Sound familiar? The Bambis model — manure becomes compost, rice hull becomes biochar, vegetable culls become feed, feed becomes livestock, livestock waste becomes soil amendment — is aquaponics thinking applied to an entire agricultural corridor.
And he was Head Chef at the Ocean Shores Tavern. Ordering stock, rostering staff, maintaining quality, managing budgets, supervising the kitchen. At this point he’d cooked in so many venues across so many states that running a kitchen was second nature. The Ocean Shores Tavern was the proof: give him the keys, he’ll run it.
Darwin — The Gas Plant — Buslink VIVO
Back to Darwin. Bus Operator for Buslink VIVO on the Ichthys LNG project — one of the largest construction projects in Australian history. This was a different world: heavy industry, strict HSE compliance, government regulation, project policies, sub-contractor requirements, pre-trip and post-trip inspections, fatigue management, defensive driving, hazard identification. Every day was procedure, protocol, and precision.
The gas plant taught Aidan what large-scale industrial operations look like from the inside. Safety culture. Chain of responsibility. Permit-to-work systems. Standard operating procedures. These aren’t just words on his resume — they’re embedded habits that now inform how he thinks about food safety, cold chain management, livestock welfare, and workplace procedures at Bambis.
Chevron — Depot and Compliance Manager
Then the career step that tied everything together. Depot and Compliance Manager for Chevron Downstream Australia (previously Puma Energy) in Port Lincoln, South Australia. August 2018 to early 2020.
This role was, in hindsight, a dress rehearsal for Bambis. Aidan ran a fuel depot: stock control, daily reconciliation, customer orders, regional scheduling, delivery coordination, vehicle inspections, gantry operations, HSE compliance, site audits, staff management, training, incident reporting, lubricant and product knowledge, offshore container compliance. He managed systems: Citrix Navision, SimPro, Sphera Cloud, IAM Portal. He managed people, authorised leave, covered shifts, and built a safety culture from the ground up.
A fuel depot and a food distribution hub are not as different as they sound. Both are about receiving product, storing it safely, tracking inventory, filling orders, loading trucks, dispatching deliveries, maintaining cold chain or temperature compliance, managing staff, and keeping meticulous records. The Ragay HQ operations office — with its order desk, dispatch planning, procurement, accounts, and quality control — is functionally a Chevron depot that handles goat instead of diesel.
2020–2023 — Back to Building
Carpentry. Commercial and residential construction with Kym Clarke Constructions and Elite Building EP in South Australia. Structural framing, interior finishing, exterior construction, weatherproofing, insulation, OSHA compliance, site safety inspections. Working toward Certificate III in Carpentry (CPC30220).
Then Transport Yard Manager for Dennis Transport. Overseeing yard operations, coordinating dispatchers, managing inbound and outbound shipments, leading yard crews, scheduling shifts, maintaining equipment, optimising layout for traffic flow, operating and manoeuvring trucks and trailers including flatbeds and refrigerated trailers, conducting deliveries to fresh food outlets under HACCP requirements. Refrigerated trailers. HACCP. Fresh food logistics.
The last two professional roles before the Philippines: window and glass installation with Nu View Windows Doors and Glass in 2024 — commercial and residential, removing and refitting, measuring, aluminium frames, glass balustrades, weatherproofing. Precision work. Detail work. Finishing work.
And then the next chapter began.
I’m tired now. I just want to share what I’ve learnt from it all and sit in my garden and listen to the birds.
Her real name is on the paperwork somewhere, but nobody in Ragay calls her that. She is Bambi — Aidan’s mother-in-law, and the woman the entire business is named after.
Bambi was a midwife in Ragay for thirty years. Not in a hospital with fluorescent lights and backup generators. In the mountains. On the back of a pony. She rode into the barangays that the roads don’t reach, carrying vaccines for children, doing health checks, delivering babies, making sure nobody was forgotten just because they lived on the wrong side of a ridge. Thirty years of that. Rain, heat, typhoons, mud trails — she went anyway.
Her mother was the principal of the local elementary school in F. Simeon, Pugod. Bambi’s family has farms there, in the green hills where the mountains start climbing behind the barangay. The family has fostered more children and families than anyone can count — the extended network is so large that Aidan hasn’t met them all yet, and he’s not sure he ever will.
Bambi herself is kind, quiet, and gentle. She has a love for gardens. She suits her name perfectly, and the name fits the business perfectly: something nurturing, rooted in community, built to look after people. She is a figurehead of the community in Ragay — not because she sought the role, but because thirty years of riding ponies into the mountains to care for other people’s children earns you that standing without asking for it.
When Aidan started learning all of this — the midwifery, the fostering, the family farms, the school, the generations of service to Ragay — he felt more and more attached to the place. The question stopped being “what can I do here?” and became “how can I give back? How do I continue this legacy?”
Alejandro — Andy to everyone who knew him — was Bambi’s husband and Aidan’s father-in-law. Andy had a farm in Agrupacion, near Ragay. When Andy passed away, the farm and the family’s agricultural roots needed someone who could carry them forward. The poultry area at the Agrupacion property is now earmarked for Raff and Grace — Andy’s family, well known and respected in the community, who have been there for some time.
Nana Bambi’s honours both of them — Bambi’s name on the sign, Andy’s land under the foundations. But the location of the main Bambis operation is still being decided. The dream is Inandawa, in F. Simeon — up in the hills above Pugod, close to Bambi’s family farms, surrounded by the green country where she rode those ponies for three decades. The right piece of land hasn’t appeared yet. But it will.
He saw a protein gap. Three hundred and fifty thousand people in Camarines Norte and Camarines Sur with zero organised supply of grass-fed meat. He saw farmers growing vegetables they couldn’t sell because there was no transport, no cold chain, and no market connection. He saw agricultural waste — copra meal, rice bran, fish scraps — being thrown away or sold for nothing while farmers imported expensive commercial feed from Manila. He saw a region with everything it needed to feed itself, connected by two national highways that form a natural loop, with no one running a circuit. And he saw Bambi pointing at the farmers down the road and saying: “They grow vegetables already but they can’t sell them.”
A feed mill that turns local waste into balanced livestock feed for six species using 100% Bicol ingredients and zero imported soybean meal. A pasture-based livestock operation raising grass-fed goats, pigs, cattle, and poultry. A slaughter and processing facility producing vacuum-sealed meat cuts. A two-truck ring road circuit running opposite directions daily, with a reefer van carrying cold product and a hauler carrying livestock and feed. A network of satellite container depots at strategic junctions along the 170-kilometre loop, each one a collection point for farmers and a distribution point for buyers. A digital system powered by Starlink satellite internet that lets every farmer check prices on their phone, drop produce at the nearest container, and get paid via GCash or swap it for feed, meat, eggs, or soil — whatever makes their life easier. An operations office at Ragay HQ taking orders from restaurants, hotels, schools, and institutions across the corridor and dispatching next-day deliveries. A café in Daet that showcases the entire farm-to-table story.
A vertically integrated, locally sourced, digitally connected, cashless, disaster-resilient food production and distribution company. Bicol’s farm-to-table Bidvest. Built by a bloke who left school at fourteen.
Every job Aidan ever did shows up somewhere in the Bambis model:
The recycling centre taught him that nothing is waste — that’s the feed mill, turning copra meal and fish scraps into livestock nutrition.
The rubber factory taught him industrial process flow — that’s the Ragay hub, raw materials in one end, finished product out the other.
Hungry Jacks taught him food service logistics — that’s the order desk dispatching standardised product on predictable schedules.
The timber yard and building houses taught him construction — that’s the slaughter facility, the feed mill, the container modifications.
Barrocco and every kitchen after it taught him how to cook with what’s available — that’s the café menu built around whatever the truck brought in that morning.
The remote outback pubs taught him how to operate where the supply truck comes once a week — that’s the satellite container network in rural Bicol.
The pearl farm taught him that aquaculture works in tropical waters — that’s the tilapia ponds at Ragay.
Flogardens and aquaponics taught him closed-loop agriculture — that’s the entire Bambis circular model where waste becomes feed becomes livestock becomes meat and the cycle never stops.
The Ichthys gas plant taught him HSE compliance and industrial safety culture — that’s the food safety, cold chain monitoring, and standard operating procedures.
Chevron taught him depot operations, stock control, scheduling, and compliance — that’s the Ragay operations office running a food distribution network instead of a fuel one.
Dennis Transport taught him yard management, reefer trucks, and HACCP fresh food delivery — that’s the two-truck circuit with temperature-controlled product.
The tour buses taught him route planning, customer service, and interstate logistics — that’s the ring road circuit with twice-daily coverage.
Every head chef role taught him stock ordering, staff rostering, budget management, and running a kitchen — that’s Alejandro’s Café at Nana Bambi’s.
He didn’t plan any of this. He didn’t study agricultural logistics or food distribution or supply chain management. He just kept moving, kept working, kept learning, and when he finally stopped moving — in Bicol, married into Bambi’s family, tired but not finished — he looked around and realised he already knew how to do every single thing that needed doing.
Aidan grew up in Aldinga Beach — a small coastal farming community full of life, adventure, and the kind of neighbourly connection that’s quietly disappearing from modern Australia. He carried that feeling with him across thirty years and a hundred jobs, looking for it in every town he passed through.
He found it again in Ragay. The farm. The neighbours who show up to help without being asked. The sari-sari store owner who knows your order. The farmer down the road who’ll swap you eggplant for eggs. The kids running between the houses. The roosters at dawn. The rhythm of a place where people still live close to the land and close to each other. And at the centre of it all, Bambi — quiet, gentle, tending her garden — the woman who held that community together with her own two hands for thirty years.
Nana Bambi’s is not an attempt to get rich. It’s an attempt to continue what Bambi started — looking after a community — and to rebuild the Aldinga Beach feeling on the other side of the world. To take everything he’s learnt — from the vines and the factory and the kitchens and the depots and the building sites and the outback and the highways — and put it to use in a place that still has the spirit he grew up with. A place where a midwife rides a pony into the mountains because someone’s child needs a vaccination. A place where families foster each other’s kids without paperwork. A place where the school principal’s daughter becomes the most respected woman in town just by showing up, every day, for thirty years.
To teach Filipino farmers that the phone in their pocket is a tool for running their livelihood, not just playing games. To show them that technology is for whatever makes your life easier. To give them a green container on the side of the road where they can swap eggplant for feed and nobody skims a peso.
And when it’s running — when the trucks are on the circuit, the containers are humming, the farmers are dropping produce, the restaurants are placing orders, and the feed mill is turning waste into feed — he wants to sit in his garden and listen to the birds.
He’s earned it.
Aidan Mulkerrins
Aldinga Beach, SA → Ragay, Bicol
mulkerrinsa5.8@gmail.com | 0405 065 465
bambis-place.netlify.app