SPC to take on Italian imports

SPC Ardmona hopes canned cherry tomatoes will soon join its flagship product.

Some tomato growers, who grew a trial crop this year for SPC, now have to wait to see if consumers want or prefer the product. "We need to be trying to stop those imports coming in and we're happy to trial anything that will work for the industry and the area."

SPC Ardmona will begin to sell the canned cherry tomatoes through independent supermarkets in September.
"It's really important to us to have an Australian cherry tomato on the shelf to give consumers the option of buying product that's been grown in this country," said Sandra Alcock, General Manager for Sales Marketing and Innovation at SPC.

Australian growers have been taste testing their product to see if it can compete with the Italian imports. This test was taken at the Australian Processing Tomato Research Council forum at Echuca. Industry Development Manager, Liz Mann said growers preferred the taste of the Australian product over the imports by a four to one ratio.
"That's fantastic. People picked the Australian grown variety without knowing which one was which."
The Italian tomatoes held their shape better in the can but were lighter in colour and the flavour was not as strong. SPC's product was sweeter and redder in colour but the texture and the shape of the tomatoes were softer. "That back to variety as well," Liz Mann said.
"The variety we trialled this year in Australia is probably not ideal for processing and there is better ones out there, so who knows?"

Some complementary data
Australian imports of canned tomatoes decreased slightly over past two or three years, but Italian products still represented 90% of imported total products last year.