Australia produces its fair share of fruit every year and there are farms across the nation that grow strawberries, blueberries, mangoes, raspberries, and loads of others. But when you’re perusing the aisles of your local supermarket, you might want frozen fruit instead of fresh.

However, what Aussies might not be aware of is that a lot of the bags of frozen fruit aren’t from Australia. Rebecca Scurr from Pinata Farms told Yahoo Lifestyle even people in the industry aren’t up to speed on this reality.

“I work with a whole bunch of people who know a lot about fruit and I was shocked by how shocked they were [when they found out]. I was like, is this not common knowledge?” she said.

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Yahoo Lifestyle tested this and went to Woolworths, Coles and Aldi to see where their frozen fruit was from.

Some were from Chile, Argentina, Peru Costa Rica, and Canada.

The 500 gram bag of Mixed Berries from Coles said it was “packed in Serbia from imported ingredients”, meaning the produce was shipped to the Eastern European country, packaged, and then shipped to Australia.

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“Fruit being packed in a country that it wasn’t even growing in is next level of wild,” Scurr said.

But it seems like plenty of everyday Aussie shoppers weren’t aware of where their products were coming from.

Rebecca posted about her discovery on social media and the comments section was flooded with people finding this out for the first time via her video.

“Embarrassed to say I had never even thought about [or] questioned this! I am totally enlightened,” wrote one person.

“Thank you for sharing this to bring awareness,” added another.

“This is an eye-opener. I never knew,” said a third.

Why is supermarket frozen fruit often from overseas?

Rebecca said Australia has very strict regulations around fruit production and farm wages are also much higher compared to other countries.

“If it was Australian produce in those bags, they would be significantly more expensive,” she told Yahoo Lifestyle.

“Everywhere in the world has cheaper labour than Australia.”

She added that the overseas fruit wouldn’t be lower in quality compared to Australian fruit as a result of these twin factors, and that if they’re being sold in Aussie supermarkets they would have to adhere to high standards.

But Woolworths also explained from their side about why imported frozen fruit makes it to their chilly shelves.

“We were told ‘Australia has amazing blueberries, but there are only just enough produced for selling fresh. You need to have a surplus to be able to then manufacture it, and then sell it as a frozen product,'” the supermarket’s Bunch blog said in 2022.

“This is why we sometimes see ingredients sourced from overseas.

“Frozen fruit is often sourced from Chile because the berries grow well in their climate, but they also have factories set up close to their farms so that they can handle the freezing process, which is very delicate.

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“For that product, we source overseas because there often are not surplus berries in Australia to meet the demand for frozen, or if there is we don’t have the factories adjacent to the farms to turn them into a frozen product.”

The supermarket added that whenever Woolies decides to stock a product, it has to be available across all stores.

If that volume quota can’t be met by an Aussie supplier, then it will need to be sourced by an overseas one.

“If we need five million units and a local supplier only has capacity for one million, then we would use the Australian supply and source the rest overseas,” it said.

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