Who's growing our food?

While a good number of popular food brands may still be Australian-owned, or at least owned by big name companies which previously used locally-grown ingredients for generations, our food and fresh produce imports now total more than $14 billion a year.

That's a huge slice of Australia's total $54.9b food and grocery (non-food) import and export trade for 2013-14.

Consumers caught off guard, and alarmed by the hepatitis A outbreak attributed to frozen Chinese fruit used by Victorian company Patties Foods, have been just as surprised to find how many other pantry staples or freezer product ingredients are imports from China, South Africa, Europe or elsewhere.

Increasingly these lines arrive relatively inconspicuously via New Zealand where they have been canned, baked or processed into products commonly to almost every Australian family shopping trolley.

Australian Made Campaign chief executive Ian Harrison said the imported berry scare had triggered a huge jump in public recognition of the value of "buying Aussie".

"This issue has highlighted how many people are unaware much of the food they purchase from so-called 'Australian' brands is actually imported," he said.

"Consumers should also be wary of label claims about ownership, Australian maps and flags often used to distract or confuse shoppers."

One of the most typical - and unexpected - examples of food not from Australia is the ubiquitous can of baked beans.

Australians eat through about 117 million cans of baked beans (navy beans) every year, but a check of the six or eight brands commonly found in any local supermarket reveals most product comes from New Zealand or Italy.

Ironically, even imported organic Italian baked beans sold under the Coles house brand are badged with the Australian Certified Organic label, making their true identity even more obscure.

The only Australian processor still using Australian-grown beans is Victoria-based SPC.

The true source of NZ-made products canned for brands such as Heinz, Watties and various supermarket private labels is rarely explained, but the chances of any of the bean ingredients coming from farms across the Tasman are slim.

Navy beans, a sub-tropical variety of kidney beans, have traditionally been grown in Australia in Queensland's South Burnett region since the 1940s, and "on and off" in northern NSW and the Murrumbidgee Irrigation Area.

While North America produces a big portion of the global crop (about 250,000 tonnes), up to 9000t were grown in Australia 20 years ago before food companies started sourcing more offshore.

Local production has slumped to around 3000t.

This summer's crop around Kingaroy in Queensland likely to be even more modest according to grain marketer Bean Growers Australia (BGA), due to tough seasonal conditions, particularly in spring.

BGA's managing director Lloyd Neilsen said the farmer-owned company had "set about rebuilding supply" to ensure adequate volumes were available to SPC, but there was no surplus available for export to NZ baked bean canneries, or anywhere else.

Attempts to grow the crop in NZ's Canterbury Plain region since the 1970s have been generally discouraging because of wet, cool conditions and yield variability.

NZ is now our main source of all processed food and beverage imports, followed by the US, China, Thailand and Singapore, according to the Australian Food and Grocery Council.

The US is our biggest source of fresh product, followed by NZ, then China and Turkey.

National Farmers' Federation (NFF) chief executive Simon Talbot, said unfortunately the Chinese frozen berry import contamination problem "was bound to happen".

"Consumers need to know that cheap, imported, frozen food is not produced under the same stringent health and hygiene standards we have in Australia," he said.

"Our scientific, regulatory and quality processes are world's best practice, but we are importing food from places that are a long way from that.

"People need to know exactly where their food has come from. If they don't, they can't make the informed choices they are entitled to make, and they want to make."

Australian Made's Mr Harrison said the surge in interest in clearer country-of-origin labelling from consumers and politicians was a welcome breakthrough for those trying to highlight the value of local product.

But he said the federal government was still delaying its decisions from the food labelling enquiry by a Senate committee on agriculture and industry last year.

The not-for-profit Australian Made Campaign wanted to eradicate "critical loopholes that currently exist" in regulations under consumer law so they fall into line with the more stringent rules for using the Australian Made and Australian Grown logo.

Mr Harrison said a continual point of consumer confusion was the use of qualified claims such as "Made in Australia from imported and local ingredients".