News on Potatoes at home from Australia

Pure Foods Tasmania Limited has agreed to buy the business and assets of Daly Potato Company Pty Ltd (DPC) for $1.8M with a mixture of cash and shares, subject to working capital adjustments.

West Australian potato growers want their potatoes back on dinner plates every day to help ease a massive glut. The advertising campaign - named Todatoes - began Saturday night with the start of a prime-time television advertising campaign.

Providing Australian consumers with more information on the package such as the potato variety and their uses would encourage them to buy more potatoes, according to the latest wave of Potato Tracker research.

Potatoes are becoming more appealing to Australia’s innovative home chefs ('Eager Explorers') who are searching for the next exciting food trend, according to new consumer research.

Consumer research in Australia, Potato Tracker, has shown that Australian consumers prefer to purchase pre-packaged potatoes, with one to two kilogram packages as the ideal sizes.

It appears that many Australians don’t know their King Edwards from their Kennebecs, with the latest wave of the Potato Tracker consumer research project indicating that some people can’t name a single variety of potato, despite being the most commonly purchased vegetable commodity.

The new ‘purple bliss’ potato (grown in Tasmania and bred in Idaho) could become a family favourite now that it has begun producing commercial quantities, and 20 tonnes are making their way to supermarket shelves.

Potatoes continue to be seen as an important staple for Australians according to the latest wave of the Potato Tracker project, with survey respondents indicating that they consume the commodity an average of 14 times per month.

AUSVEG remains wholly unconvinced of the benefits of a grower-funded generic potato marketing campaign despite claims from the Potato Marketing Corporation of Western Australia that the initiative has been a success in that state.

Potato growers in Western Australia have invested heavily in a potato marketing program aimed at stopping the decline in consumption per capita of fresh potatoes.

The weather might be warming up [well, in Australia that is, not here in Canada...PP] but that isn’t stopping Aussie consumers tucking in to a hearty serve of mashed potato, according to the latest wave of the industry-funded Potato Tracker project.

The first wave of results from the Australian industry-funded Potato Tracker project have been released, shedding encouraging new light on purchase triggers and consumption habits relating to fresh potatoes.

Australian potato growers are set to gain fresh insights into how consumers view their products as part of a new market research project that has started this month.