From Collingwood to Kuala Lumpur: The Melbourne Spice Merchant Cracking Southeast Asia

Anchor & Grove, a specialty food business operating out of a 400-square-metre facility on Smith Street in Collingwood, cleared its one-millionth export unit in June — a milestone the company hit three years ahead of its own internal projections. The product moving through port: fermented chilli condiments made from Victorian-grown capsicums, sold into Malaysia, Singapore, South Korea, Japan, the UAE, the United Kingdom, and most recently Canada.

The timing matters. Australian food exporters are navigating a compressed window of opportunity created by softer freight costs, a slightly weaker Australian dollar sitting around 63 US cents, and a post-pandemic appetite among Southeast Asian consumers for premium, traceable food products. The federal government's Free Trade Agreement with the Gulf Cooperation Council, which cleared its final ratification hurdle in March 2026, has opened a lane into the UAE that simply didn't exist 18 months ago.

Anchor & Grove's founder began the business in 2019 with a $40,000 small business loan and a single commercial kitchen rental at the Collingwood Yards arts and industry precinct on Johnston Street. The move to a dedicated Smith Street space came in late 2022, followed by a first international order — 600 units to a specialty grocer in Kuala Lumpur — in early 2023. Since then the company has worked with the Victorian Government's Food & Fibre Export Program, which provided $85,000 in matched funding for trade show attendance and in-market representation across three Asian markets.

Local Infrastructure, Global Reach

The business leans heavily on two Melbourne institutions most people outside the food industry would barely recognise. The first is the Melbourne Market Authority's wholesale facility at Epping, where Anchor & Grove sources secondary-grade capsicums — produce that would otherwise go to landfill — at prices roughly 40 percent below retail. The second is Export Connect, a North Melbourne-based consultancy that specialises in getting Victorian food producers shelf-ready for Asian retail chains. Export Connect helped Anchor & Grove decode the label-compliance requirements for Japan's Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare, a process that took 14 months and would have been cost-prohibitive without specialist guidance.

The Collingwood and Fitzroy corridor has become a quiet incubator for this kind of globally oriented food manufacturing. Warehouse rents in the area average around $180 per square metre annually — expensive by Melbourne's outer-suburban standards, but the proximity to inner-city hospitality buyers, food media, and export-savvy logistics firms on Wellington Street makes the premium defensible. Several restaurant groups in the CBD and Fitzroy have become early retail stockists, which gave Anchor & Grove proof-of-concept data for overseas buyers sceptical of an unknown brand.

The Numbers Behind the Growth

Victorian food and fibre exports totalled $17.8 billion in the 2024-25 financial year, according to the Department of Jobs, Skills, Industry and Regions. Small producers — defined as those with annual turnover under $5 million — accounted for less than 3 percent of that figure, which tells you both how much room exists and how hard it is to break in. Anchor & Grove's export revenue hit $1.1 million in the financial year just ended, still modest by industry standards but growing at 70 percent year-on-year.

The business's Korean market entry, completed in October 2025, required reformulation of two products to reduce sodium content below thresholds set by the Korean Ministry of Food and Drug Safety. That process cost roughly $28,000 in food science consultancy fees — a figure the founder described in a written statement as the single biggest unexpected cost of the expansion.

The path forward involves a planned distribution agreement with a Singapore-based regional food importer, expected to be signed before the end of August 2026. The company is also in discussions with the Australian Trade and Investment Commission (Austrade) about representation at SIAL Paris in October, one of the world's largest food industry trade exhibitions. For other Victorian food entrepreneurs eyeing export markets, the Anchor & Grove story reinforces a practical lesson: start with one market, invest in compliance early, and use Melbourne's own hospitality scene as a live testing ground before pitching to buyers 8,000 kilometres away.