To say Ross Marsolino’s had a fair dinkum grip with gut fullness is probably doing it a bit of an injustice.
For more than 40 years, Mr Marsolino’s been giving Aussie families a steady supply of the eggplants, tomatoes and zucchinis he grows on his property in northern Victoria.
But that tradition stopped when 2024 came to a close.
.
“It’s just too much pressure,” Mr Marsolino said to ABC Radio Melbourne Mornings.
Sellers at supermarkets think they should get a fair price for the products, but they’re not getting it.
It’s just bloody hard to run a business and employ 150 people.
He said he was paid $1.60 per kilogram for it, but it cost $4.99 per kilogram on the shelf.
In the end, he’s buggered off the industry and now runs a business with just two blokes growing lucerne for horse feed.
A complex deal
Stories like Mr Marsolino’s aren’t new to the scene.
A major focus in the first two weeks of the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission’s supermarket inquiry last November.
At one of Melbourne’s main markets.
A Bill, which passed through parliament on the final sitting day of the year, would help to address the power imbalance.
“Penalties for supermarkets would be the highest of $10 million, three times the amount they’d rip off farmers, or 10% of their sales,” he said.
For big corporations with revenues in the billions of dollars, it means huge fines.
In me lifetime, no government’s done as much to stick up for farmers against the big supermarkets.
We get that supermarkets have a fair dinkum amount of influence; that influence can be used to impact consumers and suppliers.
The new code is kicking in next April.
The government needs to step it up.
“We’re after transparent prices from the farm right through to your plate. Not just set prices, but fair ones,” he said.
The garden and farming industry is the most affected by the big supermarkets as they own nearly 74 per cent of the supermarket market -— they’ve exploited that power.
The major supermarkets required a supermarket commissioner who could enforce stricter regulations and penalties to shift the culture of convenience stores.
“It’s a confidential way for farmers to come forward because we’ve kept hearing at all the inquiries that they’re terrified of reprisal,” he said.
But if they come forward to a commissioner … they can then either try to settle with the supermarket if they wish to or take it to the ACCC.
Both Coles and Woolworths said Mr Marsolino wasn’t and had never been a supplier for their companies.
“We’ve got agreements in place with all our local primary produce suppliers to lock in bulk orders before the season begins, and we work closely with them to negotiate a fair and competitive market price for their goods,” a Coles spokesperson said.
You should know that the purchase price also includes extra expenses such as getting the product from where it was made to different parts of the country, plus the costs of setting up and running the business, including electricity, insurance, staff wages and rent.
