Overview
Whether you're cooking at home or dining at a local restaurant, knowing where your food comes from matters more than ever. Sometimes, that means choosing locally grown veggies or researching the farm behind the ingredients on your plate. Yet a new Indigenous-owned online marketplace is offering an exclusive taste of something wilder, where the people who most understand the land benefit from its bounty.
Just launched, Wild Foods now supplies customers and wholesalers in Brisbane with a selection of wild food products gathered by remote Indigenous-owned producers. To start, the marketplace features products from Bush Beef and Salty Monkeys Seafood — two standout First Nations suppliers based in Northern Australia — bringing ethically caught, responsibly farmed and Indigenous-owned flavours to the table.
With every product available on the marketplace wild-harvested — not farmed or feedlot-raised — Bush Beef makes for the perfect debut supplier. Operating from Normanby Aboriginal Corporation on Balnggarrawarra Country in Cape York, the station's cattle graze on open savannah grasses, resulting in small-batch products like wild beef mince, wild beef pies and specialty cuts for restaurants.
Meanwhile, hailing from Badu and Thursday Island in the Torres Strait, Salty Monkeys Seafood provides the Wild Foods marketplace with fresh tropical rock lobster, known as kaiar. Hand-caught by local free-divers in partnership with the region's Traditional Owners, kaiar is one of the most sustainable options for local lobster available. Straight from the reef, this is seafood with provenance you'll be keen to learn more about.
Adding some serious culinary credence to the fledgling marketplace, one of Australia's most acclaimed restaurants is already on board, with Melbourne fine-diner Attica now serving Bush Beef. "We're always looking for delicious, unique, and sustainable ingredients to add to our menu," says renowned Attica chef-owner Ben Shewry. "This food is harvested with respect for the planet, and we are proud to cook and serve it."
With plans to expand to Sydney within months, followed by the rest of Australia, Wild Foods offers a direct-to-market supply chain for First Nations producers, complete with cold chain logistics, food safety compliance, marketing and market access that would otherwise be cost-prohibitive for small and remote operators. That's not only good for far-flung businesses; it also unites customers who care about each bite with our fascinating Indigenous food ecosystem.
Orders are now available for customers in Brisbane, with more states to follow. Head to the website for more information.
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Images: Supplied.