Sarah Thomas

Sarah Thomas grew up on Leonard Street in Waimate.

Her dad had “the biggest garden in the universe” and “Mum’s baking is incredible - you have to try it”. There were fruit trees and lambs at home, chickens next door. Food was made at home.

“I thought everyone lived like that,” she says.

This “wholesome, simple” upbringing was one of several threads that came together in the launch of Blended by Sarah - a Brisbane-based business now delivering wholefood enteral (tube-fed) meals to people across Australia and New Zealand, with further global expansion underway.

PicturedL Sarah with her sons Cohan and Lewis, her mum Carmel, and her the Blended recipe book and enteral products.

Sarah attended Main School, then St Pat’s, then Roncalli. She left at the end of Year 10 when a job came along and earning a living felt more useful than staying at school.

She was part of the crew that opened The Warehouse in Timaru, cashed in her staff shares, and headed off to see more of the world. Brisbane was the first stop and it left a big impression.  Then on to London, where she worked her way up in event management, landing some incredible gigs including organising events at Buckingham Palace and Lord’s Cricket Ground.

“But I got to the stage where I knew more Wallabies than All Blacks,” she says. “So I always knew I’d come back to this part of the world.”

Auckland came next, but city life was never the long-term plan, especially when identical twin sons Cohan and Lewis came along. When her then husband took a role helping set up Antipodes Water with founder Simon Woolley, Whakatāne felt like the right fit. She wanted her boys to have the same rural upbringing she had.

“Whakatāne had a real community feel,” she says. “It wasn’t unusual to come home and find food left on the doorstep.”

Antipodes on Lewis Road (Ōtākiri) 

While living in Whakatāne, the idea for Lewis Road Creamery took shape.

Sarah and her then husband were co-founders alongside another Antipodes owner, Peter Cullinane. They noticed that New Zealand was exporting its best butter, so thought why not create a brand for here. Many hours were spent making butter by hand and refining recipes as they worked on creating that first batch.

The name came from its beginnings - a refrigerated container on the Antipodes site on Lewis Road in Ōtākiri. After three months of developing recipes, building the product, and sampling, the first order landed from New World Ponsonby. Things were starting to move.

Three months into that business journey, their lives took a sharp and unexpected turn.

No, we can do this.

Lewis started becoming unwell and was initially diagnosed with meningitis. On the third day of treatment for that, Sarah discovered her three-year-old son was having a haemorrhagic stroke.

The prognosis shifted quickly. First, they were told Lewis wouldn’t survive. Then, he would never walk, talk, or eat. At one point, Sarah was asked whether she had a wide enough hallway for a wheelchair at home. 

One moment in particular stays with her. Sarah asked Lewis to lift his hands and make the ‘L’ shape, which he did, and then they repeated it with a ‘C’ shape.

“I understood how serious it was,” Sarah says. “I knew exactly what was going on. But my son was still here. And I just thought, no - we can do this. He’s in there, and it’s my job to get him out. I’ve got the next 15 years to get him to a point of independence.”

When the system stopped making sense

The stroke left Lewis unable to chew or swallow safely. After years of intensive eating therapy and periods using nasogastric tubes, he was nine when doctors prescribed a gastrostomy feeding tube.

Sarah wanted Lewis to be able to eat the same food as his twin brother. But the only option offered for tube feeding was hospital-grade synthetic formula.

“It was about 50 percent maltodextrin,” she says. “Not much different from a thickshake. I didn't want my child to have a full diet of artificial sugars.”

When Sarah told staff she wasn’t comfortable with the formula and wanted to use natural foods instead, she was warned she could be reported to child services if she didn’t follow the prescribed approach.

“There was a literal risk that your kids could be taken off you if you strayed from the conventional path and fed blended food through the tube, and this was less than ten years ago” she says.

At home in her kitchen, she began blending the food she was preparing for Cohan, so the pair could still share meals. 

At the time, people like Sarah who were blending whole food for tube feeding did it quietly. You didn’t talk about it publicly. You certainly didn’t say it out loud in a hospital setting.

"Those commercial formulas kept my son alive when he first got sick and they certainly have a place. But they had the only place back then - and that didn't sit well with me." 

This was wrong, we had to fix this

Around ten years ago, Sarah came home to catch up with family, her nephew had just been born and her friend was getting married.

The first night back, she broke her Mum’s blender. It was night, shops were closed, and she was left trying to work out how to feed her nine-year-old son.

“I just thought, this is ridiculous,” she says. “Why can’t I buy what I need? Why can’t I travel with the right food? Why do I have to feed my nine-year-old processed baby food?”

That very night, in Waimate, Sarah decided to do something about it.

“This was wrong,” she says. “We had to fix this.”

Everything came together

Cooking good food had always been second nature, since Leonard Street days. 

“I love cooking. It’s my zen,” she says. 

Years working in events alongside incredible chefs meant she understood food at a practical level - what works, what doesn’t, and what people will actually eat.

By then, she’d also seen food businesses built from the inside. Watching Antipodes Water grow, followed by her hands-on role in Lewis Road Creamery, meant she understood what it took to turn food into a commercial product - manufacturing, exporting, product compliance.

The foundation was there and Sarah wasn’t going to take no for an answer.

You can tell me no to my face

The journey from idea to final product was “like climbing a mountain,” she says.

It was new territory. There were genuine risks. Manufacturers worried what would happen if something went wrong? What if someone got sick? What if someone died? Nineteen manufacturers said no.

This product had never been manufactured in Australia or New Zealand before, there was no blueprint.

When the nineteenth rejection came, Sarah was done with being told she couldn’t do it, or it was a ‘cute idea, good luck’.

“I thought, actually you can tell me no to my face.”

So she flew to Melbourne, and convinced that manufacturer to take a chance. They’re still working with her today.

It took three years to develop a commercial product that was shelf stable and met clinical, safety, and food standards. 

Blended by Sarah launched in 2020, originally under the name Wholesome Blends. The business is now in its sixth year of sales, delivering pouches of whole-food, blended meals made from fresh ingredients to thousands of families across Australia and New Zealand, with further markets on the horizon including India and the USA.

Pictured: Sarah at the 2024 Telstra Best of Business Awards and presenting to students at the University of Queensland.

Recognition

In 2024, Sarah published Blended, an award winning book of recipes designed to be blenderised and eaten by the whole family. The following year, she won Telstra Best of Business Awards for Accelerating Women, Queensland and the business has been a national finalist too. And, impressively, that same year she was appointed an Industry Fellow by the University of Queensland.

The appointment recognises Sarah’s leadership and advocacy in the enteral nutrition space, particularly her work championing blended tube feeding and expanding access to wholefood options for families, patients and clinicians.

For Sarah, the recognition matters because of how much has changed. When she began blending food for Lewis, there was little clinical research into whole-food tube feeding, no real alternatives, and limited willingness within the system to question the status quo. 

“There’s an army of parents who’ve helped drive change in this space,” she says. “I realised I just had the loud voice to make it happen”.

Today, Blended by Sarah products are available through Medical Distribution networks across Australia, and dispensed through pharmacies rather than sold as everyday food. But the conversation around tube feeding is no longer closed, and families now have options that didn’t exist a decade ago.

It all leads back to Leonard Street

Even as Blended by Sarah heads into its seventh year and turns over seven figures, Sarah hesitates to use the word success.

“What is success?” she says. “It’s not money. Success to me is reaching people. Every person I know who’s successful has one thing in common - grit. They don’t give up. I’ll never take no for an answer or leave a stone unturned if it means another family doesn’t have to go through what we went through.”

Sarah says she’ll always feel indebted to the medical community. “You join an exclusive club that no one wants to belong to,” she says. In the midst of their toughest time, Starship Hospital, Ronald McDonald House, Air New Zealand, friends, whānau, and people she’d never met, right across New Zealand, stepped up and supported them.

“I’ll never be able to repay the kindness shown to us.” Sarah says. 

And it all leads back to Leonard Street in Waimate.

“That wholesome, simple upbringing shaped far more than how I eat,” she says. “It shaped how I think, how I lead, and what eventually led me to build my business. It shaped my why. I wanted my sons to have the same kind of childhood values I did.”