One Sunshine Coast strawberry growing company is diversifying with 'ugly' fruit and is looking to increase exports, in order to reduce wastage and maximise profits.
Most of the fruit grown by Suncoast Harvest has traditionally been sold to Coles supermarkets but now there is a new market for so-called 'ugly' or imperfect strawberries that would once have been rejected.
"Aldi has opened up a bit of a market for 'all shapes and sizes', which are weird shapes and we get a lot of them," Ms West said.
"You can't get mother nature to be perfect so we need an outlet for these things too because they're really large fruit, they're heavy in weight and if we have to throw them out it makes our cost of production that much higher.
"We might have 30 per cent of our fruit like that and we need to be able to sell it.
"If we don't, that 70 per cent of perfect fruit has to perform that much better to make us viable, so we definitely need to have outlets for this type of fruit."
In a deliberate business strategy for Suncoast Harvest, 20 to 30 per cent of their crop is currently being sent overseas with existing exporters.
Ms West said export activity benefits all growers, whether they were directly involved or not, and is boosted by the low Australian dollar.
"We use a couple of different exporters and we've been exporting all season to New Zealand," Ms West said.
"We've just sent some to Malaysia and Singapore [and we are] hoping to go to the Middle East as well.
"Every pallet of fruit not on the market at the moment means the price in Australia is that little bit more buoyant.
"Last year the dollar dropped to a point where it became viable for them to use Australian markets for those strawberries that normally would come from California or somewhere.
"That opened up opportunities which really helped us financially [and] this year we went into the season hoping to expand that a lot more, and we have.
"If the dollar stays down where it is, or even a little bit lower, it's great for the industry because we grow a lot of strawberries at this time of year and if we can access those markets, it's great for everyone."
Suncoast Harvest is exporting the Fortuna and Festival varieties of strawberries, which the company also sells in Australia.
