Hailing from sunny Florida, Melissa Goffin was raised alongside the smoky flavours of American barbeque, with pulled pork, creamy mac and cheese, and cornbread being some of her favourite childhood staples. This is why when she moved down to the Mornington Peninsula in 2013, she knew she had to bring some of her favourite meals to the area.

Following a decades-long teaching career, Melissa co-founded Red Gum BBQ alongside her husband in 2017. The biz has since become Australia’s very first (and only) B-Corp-certified restaurant – meaning it has been measured as having a positive social and environmental impact. We recently caught up with Melissa to chat about her career journey; how she first started, her biggest accomplishments as well as the more challenging aspects of running a small biz.

Howdy Melissa! Tell us about who you are and what you do. Hi! I’m the managing director and co-founder of Red Gum BBQ, and I’m also the founder and chair of Women in Business Mornington Peninsula. As the managing director of Red Gum, I get to do everything that keeps the business going – I love it! I get to engage all of these parts of my brain that are analytical, financial and creative. I also have a background in media and teaching, so I get to connect with every aspect of everything I’ve learned in my life and career.

In a nutshell, what is Red Gum BBQ? We offer authentic USA food experiences to our guests, and we hope to create a really immersive experience. We get lots of visitors from the United States in particular, and they always tell us that they feel as if they've been transported back to the South! A big thing we wanted, though, is to still have a strong Australian identity, so we made sure to decorate with native flowers, use Australian wood, and we also use locally sourced red gum to give our meat a true Aussie flavour. We also offer classes where we teach and educate people about barbeque and how to nail the taste. We have a subscription service and a range of products for people to try out at home.

You’re originally from Miami and you worked as a teacher. What inspired the move to Australia and have a career change? I first came to Australia to study for a postgraduate degree in 2005, where I sort of fell into a teaching degree. I come from a long line of teachers, with my grandpa being a school principal for 40 years. Owning a barbeque restaurant was never on my mind at the time! As much as I love food, I never imagined business ownership being something that I would land into. But when I had my first child, I got to thinking about being an expat in a foreign place and longing for those BBQ tastes of home. I’d work at my computer late into the evenings, and I just felt really disconnected from what I was doing. I was listening to Oprah – procrastinating from what I was supposed to be doing – and she was talking about finding your purpose. I was hit with the need to quit teaching and go into the food business, which my husband was really excited about. It was terrifying, but so exciting to start something brand new.

What are the upsides and downsides of switching careers? The downside is that it's scary. It's risky. There’s always the thought in your head “What if this doesn’t work out?” I had worked so hard to get where I was in teaching, and I was scared of throwing it away. But, going into a new profession and starting from a place of complete lack of knowledge is now something that I feel really proud of. My husband and I didn't come to this with a lot of resources or any big investments. We literally just had the savings in our bank, and we came in with this blank slate, which is always a very uncomfortable place to be in. But the beauty of that is that you rewrite the rules! You get to make whatever you want your business to be, and I’ve always loved challenges. I love to learn.

What made you choose American BBQ? My husband was visiting me in the United States a couple of years ago, and he just fell in love with that style of food. I don't know if it was a masculine thing of the meat, the smoke and the spicy sauces, but his world changed forever after cooking BBQ. For me, having all of these connections to family, childhood and the US is all tied in with food. I’d keep asking my husband to recreate my grandma’s green bean recipe or my childhood pulled pork, so, on a selfish basis, I love being reminded of my family when I eat. We now get to gift our own kids the food I grew up on, which means the world to me.

Talk to us about being the first Australian restaurant that is B-Corp certified. That's something we're incredibly proud of. We came into the food business wanting to reduce how much waste and emissions we’re putting out, and we’re so happy that we achieved that. We are still the only restaurant in Australia that is B-Corp certified – it’s exciting for us to wave that banner – but it’s also a pretty devastating statement on the pace of the hospitality business in this country. I'd love to see us joined by hundreds more B-Corp restaurants. I think it's also really a statement on the realities of the restaurant industry and how difficult it can be to have a positive environmental and ethical impact.

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