Powering Restaurants and Cafes

While you are sleeping, this major suburban food market quietly powers Melbourne

Providing an alternative to the dominance of major supermarkets, the market is like a miniature city that rises and falls each night, built on cucumbers, apples, forklifts – and bacon and egg rolls.

In the northern Melbourne suburb of Epping, a sprawling 67-hectare market trades six days a week – an estimated $2 billion worth of fruit and vegetables moving through its gates. And most of the buying and selling happens before you’ve even woken up.

This is Melbourne Market, one of six markets of its kind in Australia that’s an invisible but important cog in our food system.

“They remain a very important part of the supply chain. Particularly as the market share of the supermarkets increases, they become an absolutely essential alternative path to market [for farmers],” says chair of the National Farmers’ Federation’s Horticulture Council, Jolyon Burnett.

It’s mostly independent greengrocers that use the market, plus wholesalers that supply restaurants, cafes and bars. Buyers for IGA supermarkets are there, but Coles and Woolworths use their own supply chains for the majority of their fresh stock.

Arriving on a Thursday at 5am, the pace feels frenetic, although apparently the market is winding down.

Most of the 2000 buyers came at 3.30am, examined that day’s produce, made their picks and packed up their vans to get their hauls of fruit, vegetables, herbs and flowers back to shops, restaurants and cafes across the state.