What was it all about?

Little is known about the Australian vegetable juice market, including what drives consumption, and what potential, if any, the market offers to growers – so this project explored opportunities in this market for the vegetable industry.

The project team conducted desktop research and retail audits to identify the types of vegetable juice products available to Australian consumers and the type of information and advice about juices that are circulating publicly.

They also held focus groups in Australian capital cities, to find out:

• How vegetable juice consumers consume vegetable juices, what motivates them to do so, and things they do with vegetable juice that could be packaged/marketed to other consumers
• What stops those who do not consume vegetable juice from doing so, and what might persuade non-users to consume vegetable juice.

An online survey of Australian consumers was also conducted to estimate the size of the vegetable juice market, what segments the market is divided into, what motivates consumers in each of the segments to drink vegetable juice, and what potential exists to increase consumption.

Further research was conducted with industry participants, to look at the ability of growers to take advantage of the juice opportunities identified by the project, and which vegetable juice opportunities offer the most potential for growers – either directly or through increased demand from juicers in the supply chain.

Key findings include:

• Australians consume around 93,000 tonnes of vegetables (or 3 per cent of total annual vegetable production in Australia) in juice form each year
  
  
• The majority is consumed as commercial products – 48 per cent is pre-packaged with 23 per cent is made fresh to order, and 29 per cent being juices made at home
  
  
• The most common vegetables consumed as juice are: tomatoes (29 per cent), carrots (24 per cent), celery (11 per cent), beetroot (10 per cent), cucumber (6 per cent) and kale (4 per cent), with the remaining 16 per cent being all other vegetables and herbs
  
  
• About half of daily consumption occurs in the morning, with about one third of those consumers having their vegetable juice with breakfast, and about one quarter having it as a meal replacement
• Overall, about 30 per cent of consumption is as an accompaniment to a meal and about 20 per cent is as a meal replacement
• The majority of Australian consumers have some experience of vegetable juice:

o   15 per cent are frequent drinkers, consuming vegetable juice two to four times each week or more often (frequent drinkers account for nearly 80 per cent of current consumption)

o   36 per cent are occasional drinkers, consuming every two to three months

o   30 per cent of consumers have tried it, but not in the past year

o   20 per cent of consumers aged 16 and over have never tried vegetable juice.