Farm to Table

Zoe Lamont’s contagious and joyful laugh resonates through a cluster of alfresco diners partaking in the inaugural Riverina Good Food Weekend. The weekend celebrates the growers and makers behind farm gates in one of the country’s most productive and fertile food bowls, the Riverina of New South Wales. Zoe is passionately explaining the reason she and her husband, Frank Coorey, started the event and how important it is to promote local produce.

Together, the couple own Farm Door, a ready-made meal and wellness company — though working side by side with her husband of 11 years in a business like this was never part of Zoe’s original life plan.

“I’m more of a people person than a product kind of person,” says Zoe. “If I am going to be working alongside my husband selling a product, I am so glad that it is food. I love food and I love how food connects people and communities.”

Born and raised at Harefield, 25 kilometres north of Wagga Wagga, the 42-year-old lived on a sheep and cropping property with her mother, Nar, father, David, and brother Andy. When she was growing up, most of her time was spent outside on their property, Glenmoira, running around with the neighbours. “They used to call us ‘the six pack’,” remembers Zoe. “We would go around to each other’s houses, but everyone loved coming to ours because Mum always had the Anzac biscuit jar full.”

In 2005, after completing a degree in communications at Charles Sturt University in Bathurst, New South Wales, Zoe headed overseas and volunteered for humanitarian projects in Thailand, Burma and Zambia. She was in awe of the hospitality shown to her by those she was helping.

“I became very immersed in those communities and their culture,” says Zoe. “They really had nothing, but they would always try to give you something, even if it was their last piece of betel nut.”

This time spent overseas had a big impact on Zoe’s career. In 2008, while living in Sydney, she launched her own communications and financial wellbeing consultancy company, which focused on working with startup social enterprises who wanted to create genuine change, rather than simply on financial profits. Zoe began to see a clear pattern emerging of what made a successful startup.

In 2014, Zoe, Frank and their children, Freddie and Alice, moved from Sydney to Cootamundra for Frank’s work as a meat trader. But four years later, the abattoir where Frank was employed closed. It forced the couple to reevaluate and they quickly decided to start their own business.

“Frank and I have always loved cooking,” adds Zoe. “We started hunting around for a business in food, but we wanted something that wouldn’t require us to work evenings or on weekends. That was when we found My Chef in Wagga.”

Zoe soon started drawing on her startup experience as the pair realised what potential My Chef had. “We learned the ropes and developed a plan to grow the business. It meant we could build our own facility so we could make and sell the meals at a larger capacity — which meant we could work with more local producers,” says Zoe.

But their dreams didn’t stop there. The pair wanted to be able to tell their customers more about people producing the ingredients for their meals.

“We always used local produce when we could, but we weren’t marketing it,” says Zoe. “For example, we live 10 minutes from Wollundry Grove Olives where the olives for our olive oil are grown and pressed. That’s something we should be shouting about loudly from the rooftops.”

The desire to connect producers with consumers and create a more wholesome paddock-to-plate environment for the meals they were making led them to rebrand the business as Farm Door. “Rebranding was a huge but great move for us,” explains Zoe. “To stand out in an increasingly competitive market, we had to communicate what we do differently.”

This new direction has been a game changer. Zoe and Frank have grown Farm Door’s output of ready-made meals from 500 a day to 3000, employing more than 40 people and collaborating with chefs and restaurants such as Three Blue Ducks.

Driven by their love for small-scale producers, Zoe and Frank launched the inaugural Riverina Good Food Weekend in September 2025, kicking off with the Terra Firma Long Lunch and the Canola Trail x Growers Sunday Drive, celebrating more than 50 local makers and their products. Over the next five years, Zoe and Frank hope to make Farm Door a hub for agritourism.

“I’d love to run women’s wellbeing programs out here on our property that focus on nature and food as well school holiday farm-based food programs for kids.”

While Zoe thinks her career has been a “bit of a dog’s breakfast”, she has woven her experiences through everything she has done. She’s a provider; she helps others and gives the smaller businesses, those paddock-to-plate producers, a helping hand whenever she can.

“I just hope that through our business and events we can help shift the mindset around how we source food,” says Zoe. “For me, food has always been about feeling good and part of that is knowing where your food has come from — and of course, who you’re eating with!”

To learn more visit Farm Door or Riverina Good Food Weekend, or visit their Instagram.