Australian greenhouse tomatoes much more affordable

Last week I was on holiday in Australia (Gold Coast) – I could not help myself, on the first day I visited Coles- my first stop the produce area. To my slight surprise the price of tomatoes – large loose round Australian greenhouse tomatoes was (Aus) $ 5.90 per kg!!  Two days earlier, at my local South Auckland supermarket, NZ grown greenhouse tomatoes were (NZ) $ 18 per kg!!!  Even if you allow for the exchange rate the difference between the two countries is plain crazy and is the partly because of what I wrote about in my last article. I wish I could complain about the quality of the tomatoes in Australia, but I cannot as they were excellent quality and delicious.

It is not just in Australia that tomatoes are a much fairer price, we have friends holidaying, in NZ, from Singapore. The cost of living in Singapore is much higher than in NZ. However, this week the cost of tomatoes is approximately $6.13 per kg, much cheaper than here in New Zealand.

https://www.lazada.sg/shop-groceries-fresh-produce-fresh-vegetables-tomatoes/

Since I returned to NZ the price in my local supermarket had reduced, in less than ten days from that staggering price of $ 18 a kg to $ 10 per kg (still much higher than Aus). New crops will soon be harvesting, and existing crops will increase in volume harvested per m2/week – but we should remember Australian tomatoes have been imported into New Zealand.

Labour weekend has always been the time volume starts to really spike and therefore price comes down. I will be extremely interested to see what happens in the coming weeks and over the next season. It may stay stable but as plantings have been all over the place, I am for the first time in years not able to predict what was once predictable.

Produce overall is particularly good in Australia, I purchased a pineapple for only $ 3.00 Aus. The bananas were a fair price, but I did notice that the Australian bananas, in all the stores, were short in length. The length of the locally grown Australian bananas were noticeably shorter than NZ’s imported varieties. This was great to see because we know that the greenhouse bananas grown in NZ are slightly shorter than imported bananas but are certainly comparable if not larger than what I noticed in Australia.

It gives me confidence the NZ home buyer/purchaser at some point will be willing to buy a smaller banana grown here in NZ.

Article written and compiled by Stefan Vogrincic

All Article’s checked and edited by Marie Vogrincic

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