Just Juice uses imported ingredients for its apple juice and orange juice. Huon Hooke
There are 400 million litres of red wine in tanks around Australia, we are told. Hundreds of hectares of red grapevines have been left unharvested in the last couple of vintages. So why are Bickford’s importing red grapejuice from Chile?
For the same reason Just Juice uses imported ingredients for its apple juice and orange juice, I suppose. Economics. It’s apparently cheaper to bring juice concentrate in from afar than to buy the local produce.
Last time I looked, we were growing plenty of apples and oranges in Australia. Certainly, grapes, apples and oranges are seasonal, but there are ways to store juice so that it can be packaged and sold when those fruits are out of season locally.
It’s a special kind of logic, to import red grape juice when we have grapegrowers going out of business because there’s no market for their grapes. According to Peter Bailey of Wine Australia, reported in Good Weekend magazine (9/11/24), the surplus of red wine in Australia leading into the 2024 vintage was about 400 million litres.
Perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised. After all, this is the country that exports its natural gas by the shipload to other countries while we are told the rising price of gas at home is because there’s a shortage of it.
I asked Bickford’s a series of questions, which the following didn’t answer satisfactorily, but I quote it here in the interests
This Article was originally published on The Real Review
