After I left my middle-class, good schooling background in London, I decided that I wanted to travel rather than head straight to university. I travelled to a party beach with two of my friends and I lasted less than a week there. I decided that I was more interested in an advert I found about a ‘meditation retreat’ although I didn't really know what meditation was at the time. Here I was at eighteen years old at a party beach in Asia and then I went to my first Vipassana retreat on an island with no cars. It was a bit of a shock to my system but it changed my path. After I finished the course I decided to go and visit indigenous cultures, so I went to North East Thailand, where at the time there were zero tourists. No-one spoke English and there were no guest houses so you had to stay at people’s houses. I stayed for a couple of months in one place where I learnt that communication is much more real and intense when there are no words. When you are forced to live on the same verandah with ten other people you have to be in harmony with one another and with nature. They grew their own food and it brought my focus to the fact that these people were the healthiest, happiest, most vibrant people I had ever met. So, I decided to look at the connection between the vibrancy of these people and food and nature. I studied by observing for quite some time, going back and forth between Asia and London and filling my rucksack with books. I soon realised that essential fatty acids were absolutely key to changing Western civilizations symptoms that were being received from bad nutrition and processed foods. I came across hemp and looked up the nutritional benefits of the seed and discovered that it contained the best source of essential oils and fats in the world. That’s when I fell in love with hemp. I went back to the UK and started my mission and in 1993 I created Europe’s best selling Health Snack. We are now set up in the beautiful hinterland of Bangalow and Hemp Foods Australia is the largest Australian certified organic hemp Food wholesaler, retailer, manufacturer and exporter in the Southern Hemisphere.

Paul (hemp Foods Australia)