On a recent trip to Indonesia, one of Australia’s closest neighbours, I gorged myself on tropical fruits knowing it would be a while before I’d find them again. It got me thinking. Why is it that in Australia we can buy grapefruits year-round thanks to seasonal shipments from farms in California; pomegranates imported from India are in ready supply, but the most delicious tropical fruits are impossible to find?
Supermarket shelves are mostly dedicated to European fruits like apples and oranges. Yet one-quarter of Australia’s landmass is considered tropical and many of the so-called “exotic” fruits we eat on overseas holidays like dragonfruit, mangosteens, rambutan, soursop, snake fruit, jackfruit and durian grow well in parts of Far North Queensland the Northern Territory and even New South Wales.
“The supply is there but it’s not enough. The demand is outstripping supply,” Zona Tan-Sheppard, CEO and founder of tropical fruit distributor The Thorny Fruit Co, told PEDESTRIAN.TV.
Tan-Sheppard grew up in Malaysia but has lived in Sydney for more than a decade and said as Australia’s Asian population has grown, so too has the demand for tropical fruits.
“I’m part of a Facebook migrant community and, as usual, everyone who was South-East Asian was asking ‘where do I find these ingredients?’” she said.
In 2018 she found a durian farm in the NT set up by a Malaysian family in the 1990s and wanted to put in a wholesale order, but the minimum was 20kgs. So she asked the Facebook group.
“20kgs became an order of 400kgs,” she said.
“Immediately people started asking, ‘can you get mangosteens? Can you get pomelos?’”
So in 2019 she launched her business, but she soon realised just how many roadblocks stood in the way of Australians’ reliable access to tropical fruits.
Tropical fruits have short seasons and need a stable climate
The people in charge aren’t familiar with tropical fruits
