Kakadu Organics: a first Singapore export deal in 2023

In 2014, Kylie-Lee Bradford, a Murrumburr woman from Australia’s Kakadu National Park, put her idea for a native-food business into practice. Her brand, Kakadu Organics, uses native fruits and herbs in its products. Its range includes macadamia oil infused with lemon myrtle and wild lime, organic bush teas, jams, chutneys and spices.

Before going overseas, she wanted to understand the markets she would enter. In an Austrade interview, Bradford said the company’s first step towards exporting was to contact the agency. Her reason was direct: understanding the destination markets. This is how she described the beginning of her export journey.

She then used Austrade’s Go Global Toolkit to assess her readiness to export, explore markets and design an export plan for her products. In this brand’s experience, learning about markets and preparing to export involved a specific tool and planning steps.

In 2023, Kakadu Organics was one of nine companies in a Singapore Landing Pads program for First Nations businesses. Austrade developed the program with Australia’s Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, taking the native-food brand to Singapore.

The preparation was closely connected to selling products: workshops covered branding, pitching products and market entry. For the participating businesses, branding and product pitches were explicit parts of the program’s learning activities.

The turning point came after contact with a local retailer. Bradford said the company’s first export deal with Ryan’s Grocery came from its Singapore trip with Austrade. That connection between the trip and the deal is the founder’s account.

Austrade reported that the brand secured the deal after meeting Ryan’s Grocery representatives during the trade mission. At the time of the report, the Singapore retailer stocked Kakadu Organics’ native jams, chutneys, oils and dukkah online and in its stores.

For a small brand preparing to export, the visible progress in this case is concrete: meeting retailer representatives, securing a deal and getting products into online and physical shops. A named buyer and specific stocked products make that progress traceable in the report.

After Singapore, the brand was working with Austrade to explore opportunities in Malaysia and had sent samples to a potential customer. The report described this stage as exploration and sampling, showing the next market’s specific progress after the Singapore deal.

Sources

• Kakadu Organics builds export success on love of native foods | Austrade

Some images in this article are generated illustrations.