CALLING all Australian passionfruit and guava producers: if you can supply fruit year round in commercial quantities, then Emma and Tom want to hear from you.
That's Emma Welsh and Tom Griffith, the makers of Emma & Tom's bottled juice and whole-fruit smoothies.
In just five years the company has grown to produce 200,000 bottles of fresh juice a month and is stocked in 2000 delis and cafes across the nation.
That means, somewhere in Australia, someone buys a bottle of Emma & Tom's juice every 15 seconds - and that's a lot of happy Australian orchardists, according to Ms Welsh.
"Because our product is all about the taste, we don't use imported concentrate," she said.
And because the company uses only whole fruit - each 350-millimetre bottle has the equivalent of three pieces of fruit - buying Australian makes sense from a logistical, economic and quality perspective.
It also sets the company apart from the other major players in Australia's $1 billion juice market.
With the exception of some fruits that aren't grown in large commercial quantities in Australia (such as passionfruit and guava) all the product is sourced from local growers.
"Because we use whole fruit, we can't get the ingredients cheaper elsewhere even if we wanted to," she said.
The mangoes and bananas come from Queensland, most of the citrus fruit from the Murrumbidgee Irrigation Area in NSW and other fruits from South Australia and Victoria.
The juice is bottled in Mudgee, NSW, and the company, which is managed from Melbourne, remains Australian owned.
But producing a fresh juice made from whole fruit has had its challenges for the duo.
"Our supply is entirely subject to weather and market conditions and we do get seasonal variation in our product from the fruit itself - our product doesn't taste the same week in week out," Ms Welsh said.
Being aware of the industry's needs for a diverse range of fruit crops and supporting farmers with high-value crops, by giving them priority to water, was just one way the Federal Government could strengthen the industry, she said.
"Being smaller means we are not as vulnerable as the bigger players - we can still source our required product locally when the crops are smaller without turning to concentrate - but we've still had to look around and ensure there are alternate sources should we ever need them," Ms Welsh said.
