If you missed out on Nielsen Australia’s Chanel Day speaking at the future food trends panel at Hort Innovation, don’t worry – the Harvest to Home online dashboard is continuing to deliver the latest retail data on Australian vegetable sales.

The latest round of monthly data has now been uploaded, providing hard numbers behind some of the insights Chanel provided at Hort Connections:

Asian vegetables

Historically, ethnic diversity in Australia has centred on European demographics. Today, howevr, Asian-born Australians represent more than 10% of the overall population. Their footprint has doubled in the past 20 years and shows no signs of slowing.

Asian-Australians love fresh food and devote more than one third of their grocery spend to fresh foods. We are seeing this influence in the sales of categories like leafy Asian vegetables: over the past year, dollar sales for leafy Asian vegetables grew 5.9 per cent and the proportion of Australian households who purchased leafy Asian vegetables grew to 36 per cent (up from 34 per cent the year prior).

Kale

Australian shoppers are increasingly searching for healthy options and vegetables that are positioned as being healthy and stay top-of-mind for shoppers are well placed to capitalise. Kale is certainly one of those products – however, when compared with other vegetables, the percentage of households that purchased kale over the past year remained relatively low at just 14% of Australian households.

Fresh salad

Households are busier than ever before, and this is changing how Australians shop for groceries and how they prepare and eat food in their homes. This trend is delivering sales growth in categories like fresh salad, which grew 9.3 per cent over the past year, driven by packaged and ready-to-eat formats such as salad bowls and salad kits which offer convenient solutions to busy households.

When asked for the major reasons Australian shoppers purchase fresh salad, ‘convenience’ and ‘easy-to-use’ were the triggers driving their purchases, and 83 per cent of Australian households purchased fresh salad in the past year.

Don’t forget to bookmark the free Harvest to Home dashboard and check in regularly to see the latest insights about the performance of your vegetable lines.

This post appeared in the AUSVEG Weekly Update published 10 July 2018. Subscribe to the Update using our online form to receive the latest industry news in your inbox every week!

MT17017 Vegetable Cluster Consumer Insights Program has been funded by Hort Innovation using the onion, sweetpotato and vegetable research and development levies and contributions from the Australian Government. Hort Innovation is the grower-owned, not-for-profit research and development corporation for Australian horticulture.