Garlic lovers can now buy Australian-grown all year round, thanks to decades of work by persistent farmers who refused to give up on the difficult crop.
“I was a young man with black hair and now I’m an old man with white hair so it’s taken literally a lifetime,” Australian Garlic Producers chief executive Nick Diamantopolous said.
When he began growing garlic in the 1990s, most Australians were eating imported bulbs, predominantly from China.
But a belief that consumers would back locally grown, Mr Diamantopolous set out to take on the world.
Sheer persistence
The task of converting a market reliant on cheap imports to one that valued Australian garlic was enormous.
Presently, China produces 75 per cent of the world’s garlic. From competing with cheap labour overseas, to finding garlic seed that was virus-free, and matching the right varieties with the right conditions, growers had their work cut out for them.
“I was lucky that I was young and probably naive at the time,” Mr Diamantopolous said.
As an industrial chemist by trade, Mr Diamantopolous searched the globe for different varieties that could work in a range of distinct Australian climates.
“It involved a lot of crop failures, a lot of disasters, a lot of learning,” he said.
As demand for higher-quality garlic grew, supermarkets replaced Chinese imports with product from Spain, Mexico and Argentina.
Meanwhile, domestic garlic paste filled the gap as Australian growers worked even harder to find the varieties that would allow them to scale up.
“We were replacing imported garlic very, very slowly,” Mr Diamantopolous said.
“By making a garlic paste, we were able to provide an Australian garlic offer at a time of the year when there was no Australian garlic bulbs on the shelf at all.”
Supplying garlic year-round
Garlic has a storage life of about six months. Utilising that trait and combining it the different growing conditions available in Australia at any given time proved to be the key to consistent supply.
“Overseas, they have a four-week harvest window because they’ve just got one little climatic zone,” Mr Diamantopolous said.
“It’s quite interesting, very unique, what we’re doing in Australia. Not many other countries can do [it].”
Harvest typically starts in the Northern Territory and Queensland in September, followed by New South Wales and Victoria, finishing in South Australia in December and January.
Growers such as brothers David and Andrew Moon in St George, Queensland, are a key link in the chain.
“Without it, it’s impossible to supply Australian product for 12 months,” Andrew Moon said.
The Moon family was growing melons but looked for crops to grow in south-west Queensland that were more water-efficient and began experimenting with onions and garlic.
“When a major customer approached us to see if we’re interested that’s when we started getting sort of half serious,” Andrew Moon said.
He said most people “thought they were mad” when they began planting garlic.
“We get pretty good support from the community now, we employ a lot of people,” he said.
Consumers drive the future
As growers were able to meet the demand, the market began to place more orders.
Supermarket chain Coles said its decision to solely stock Australian garlic was driven by customers.
“We supported our garlic growers … by adjusting product specifications, meaning the aesthetics of the garlic weren’t the same. However, we were able to meet our commitment to supplying Australian garlic,” a spokesperson said.
At rival supermarket giant Woolworths, the “vast majority” of its garlic is sourced from Australian growers.
“We do source some garlic from overseas to ensure we have enough supply to meet the needs of our millions of customers each week,” a spokesperson said.
Having successfully flipped the market, Nick Diamantopolous said the industry was now focused on staying “a step ahead” of climate change, and researching the health benefits of garlic.
“That’s just my curiosity,” he said.
“It’s an old wives’ tale that garlic is so good for you and I thought, ‘Well, let’s put that to the test.'”
At Moonrocks, the Moon family’s farms, the brothers have begun exploring ways to process and sell the garlic that doesn’t rely on supermarket sales.
“We started a new venture in G’day Garlic [garlic products] through COVID because we didn’t have an ecommerce platform and we wanted to get into that market as well,” he said.
“[That is] the future for us, in ecommerce, selling direct to customers.”
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