Amberley Brady [00:00:00]:
Food security to me is really about the availability. So having sufficient quantities, the access, so people being able to afford as well as have the ability to purchase the items, the utilization of the food. So it must be safe, prepared without contamination and the stability, the confidence in those systems that food will be there and despite those potential shocks to the critical infrastructure or the economic crisis or even a conflict where there’s a cyber incident and the system’s taken out. So it’s really how do we harden up those four key areas and make sure that we are food secure as a country?

Karissa Breen [00:00:59]:
Joining me now is Amberly Brady, founder at Real Food Price. And today we’re discussing the next national security crisis isn’t military, it’s food. So, Amberly, thanks for finally joining me and welcome.

Amberley Brady [00:01:12]:
Hello, KB. Thank you for having me. And I’m so excited to be on your show. I know it’s been a long time coming, so awesome. I’m great. I’m happy to be here.

Karissa Breen [00:01:21]:
Well, definitely worth the wait because one thing that’s really interesting about this conversation is I haven’t actually spoken about this topic. I’ve spoken about every other topic you can think, but not this one. So I’m really keen. I think it’s going to be quite an exceptional interview. You obviously got a very strong background with your pedigree and also your experience. So I want to start there. Now, you sort of say Amberly, and you’ve been giving a few talks in the space at the moment. Locally in Australia, you said that hunger is a national security issue and the threat is at our doorstep.

Karissa Breen [00:01:52]:
So I want to explore this a little bit more. And what does that actually mean?

Amberley Brady [00:01:56]:
So for me, I just want to take you back to COVID 19, KB. So you would remember how quickly things started to fall apart in our supermarkets and that kind of thinking of, okay, I need potatoes or I need to go to the store and I need to source this particular item. Now, you will remember that when we went to the stores, things weren’t on the shelves. Right. And why was that? Because there are systems that underpin the delivery of those items that are exceptionally fragile. And so for me, that is a national security issue in Australia. Through something like COVID 19, we ran out of food. And it wasn’t necessarily that the food wasn’t there.

Amberley Brady [00:02:43]:
It was not getting to us. So thinking through that, there are a number of different systems that underpin that. So why is that a national security issue? Because if we don’t have food on the shelves, we can’t eat. And to me, the most dangerous people are those who are looking at starvation. Because once you are in that mindset, it’s all bets are off. Right. It’s kind of like the Hunger Games of sourcing different items for you to eat overnight. It’s those fragile food systems that are underpinning the critical infrastructure to bring us those, those daily items.

Amberley Brady [00:03:21]:
And we take it for granted because it’s just always been there. And until it wasn’t, we hadn’t really had a taste of what that kind of anarchy could look like. And it really was anarchy and difficult for us. You know, with toilet paper. We saw there were fights in the stores. And recently, you know, in Japan, there was a rice crisis. And it was the same behavior, straight up people running to the stores and were not able to get the rice that they were thereafter. So there are countries who are working hard to ensure food security.

Amberley Brady [00:03:54]:
So that’s really it. KB from my perspective.

Karissa Breen [00:04:38]:
Yes. People in now, I mean, living in the US you’ll be like, oh yeah, I remember Australia. I remember people going nutso about toilet paper.

Amberley Brady [00:04:44]:
We’re like one of the only countries that are food secure, so we don’t need to be like that. And which is the wildest part, because we create our own food and fiber. We actually feed 70 million people, so we’re not going to run out. But what will happen is there’s the potential for extreme shocks in our infrastructure, you know, that the items won’t necessarily get to us. And it could be that a particular store down the road does get those items. And why does that store get the item and not us? So why do I have to drive around in my car to find potatoes when we have systems there that should be working more efficiently to get these items to us and they the systems. So food security to me is really about the availability, so having sufficient quantities, the access so people being able to afford as well as have the ability to purchase the items, utilization of the food. So it must be safe prepared without contamination and the stability.

Amberley Brady [00:05:41]:
And that’s what I’m talking about, the confidence in those systems that food will be there and despite those potential shocks to the critical infrastructure. So like a natural disaster. So you could have the floods or the fires that we’ve had or COVID 19 or the economic crisis or even a conflict where there’s a cyber incident and the system’s taken out. So it’s really how do we harden up those four key areas and make sure that we are food secure as a country? I’m not sure what’s happening in the US in on the day to day, but I’ve seen that DARPA is doing a lot of research in this space, so they’re heavily looking into Agritech, spending a lot of money on that. So yeah, I just don’t know what you’re seeing on the ground, if there’s anything kind of.

Karissa Breen [00:06:24]:
Well, there’s a lot of food stores here and there’s a lot of fresh food. So anyone that think it’s all about fast food, there’s not. Not where I live in Florida. But I think that the conversation around when people behave like that, that’s the part. There’s a couple of things that you said in there that I want to get into. What would you attribute to why people were reacting such an extreme way, like toilet paper? And I remember even my now husband going to this. Where I used to live in Sydney, it was like a local iga. I had to like ask the lady and she knew me and then she’s like, oh, I’ve got so at the back like as if I was importing something illegal or something.

Karissa Breen [00:06:59]:
And I’m literally. There’s a photo of me carrying it down the street in a box to conceal it in case, you know, someone wants pretty much.

Amberley Brady [00:07:18]:
It’s lacking the awareness and that sort of excitement to plan and to have the, the education and to have that messaging and the trust in the information that’s coming out.

Amberley Brady [00:07:55]:
So there needs to be more integrated planning and, and sort of joint risk assessments to identify the vulnerabilities and to able to sort of explain those to people because we don’t know what’s running out and when it’s going to run out. And when it does run out, it’s like panic, right? We run and grab more toilet paper than we could ever need. And people were hoarding it. So people had like. And I think that’s what. Why your local IGA was kind of dealing it in that way, because people were stockpiling and sort of doomsday behavior. And it’s because there is this lack of trust in the information that’s coming up. And there’s a reason that we don’t trust that information around the food supply because we see how our farming community is treated by these sort of large corporations.

Amberley Brady [00:08:39]:
For example, I sat down with Melons Australia CEO John O’Davy, and over the summer months, melon growers were being paid 40 cents a kilo.

Amberley Brady [00:09:18]:
And that’s where there’s this kind of interjectory between, you know, agriculture policy, security that I think we need to as a community in the security community really figure out how we can do this better.

Amberley Brady [00:10:03]:
So we need to work better in this space really. I think that’s how we do it. KB, there’s, you know, how can we work better? Integrated planning and assessment so joint risk assessment to identify the vulnerabilities within the critical infrastructure. Looking at, you know, climate threats, supply chain disruptions which are the cyber sort of the security elements. Australia could look at having strategic reserves. So that’s like a resilience planning piece where there’s seed banks that we already do have but having food reserves. And it was interesting the other day I was talking to someone who said we have and I think it’s publicly out there. I’ve seen it somewhere else but I can’t remember the source. But 22 to 22 days of I think it was petrol reserves.

Amberley Brady [00:10:42]:
So we also need to consider how reserves would could be used as a diplomatic currency in terms of we could also be giving this out to our close Asia Pacific partners. How do we make sure that we look after those people? Because we’re feeding 70 million people with what we’re creating in Australia. So it’s not just Australian people that are benefiting from what we have. And also looking at sort of investment alignment so a piece between, you know, defence and horde innovation how we can look at better the investment between the, the different spaces that they’re doing in the food security, making sure it’s a national security approach because hort innovation have amazing, amazing stuff going on there. So does defense but it’s really about how do we invest and align that investment. Looking at tech infrastructure protection so the security of the systems and my personal favorite is the data sharing and intelligence coordination like my platform real food price where we coordinate that information and have those discussions like I demonstrated with Melons Australia and they are really like industry are ready for these discussions. So it’s really about pulling all the people in. And that’s what I look at my position here is I look at that strategic alignment piece where pull in defense, pull in horde innovation.

Amberley Brady [00:12:04]:
And I know I’m kind of going on a bit of a soapbox here, so cut me off at any time, KB, because I feel like I’m kind of talking at you. But it’s really a shared experience that we’ve all been through.

Amberley Brady [00:12:53]:
You know, COVID 19. And I thought coming out of COVID we’d all fix this. But I think we all move so quickly and so happy to get out of it that we were like, right, okay, it’s not so bad anymore. And we all sort of forgot. And that’s why I really want to drag back those. I don’t like living in the past, but I like to drag back that feeling of when we were on the, you know, on the street with our toilet paper during the hustle, trying to get home to survive. Because think about that on a grander scale. And it’s dire.

Amberley Brady [00:13:19]:
You know, I don’t want to think about the world that we’re going to leave if we don’t start doing something now. And it is a crawl to start with, but we really need to. The rest of the world is doing something, and even if they’re not, we need to look.

Karissa Breen [00:13:32]:
And what you’re saying makes sense. Right. So there’s a couple of things I want to double click on now. When you’re saying items running out, are you more concerned or what’s more likely to run out first? Is it condiments? Is it just fruit and vegetables? So fresh produce? Is it personal hygiene products? What? Give me sort of a ranking system.

Amberley Brady [00:13:50]:
So I haven’t looked at, you know, that resilience piece. Like what will go first. Right. But what the things that matter are the things that are going to provide real nutritional benefit primarily. And the issue with that is the systems are not. They’re not well organized in a way that we will always have supply. So there’s oversupply issues where there’s too much. And I was talking yesterday to someone in the tomato industry who said that they would have tons and tons of tomatoes that were perfectly fine that they would have to throw out because they were rejected.

Amberley Brady [00:14:24]:
So there’s.

Karissa Breen [00:14:24]:
Why were they rejected? Because there’s just too much of them they don’t have.

Amberley Brady [00:14:28]:
When they were sent to the distribution center, they were deemed inappropriate for whatever reason.

Karissa Breen [00:14:33]:
Is that because they’re shaped weirdly? I think that there is no.

Amberley Brady [00:14:36]:
And this is, this is what they said. There was an oversupply. And with the contracts, the way that the contracts had been written is that they don’t have to accept them because there’s rolling contracts with different suppliers. And if there’s an oversupply, they don’t necessarily have to take the item. There’s no onus on that to be carried through. So there’s a lot of waste out there, which is horrendous. So we could be doing so much better in this space and looking at that supply. Why do we have these many, these many items coming on at the same time? And so there’s ways around that we could have planning across the whole of the agro agricultural space.

Amberley Brady [00:15:12]:
Like people having a joint calendar saying this is when my crops coming on, this is where I’m sending it. There hasn’t been this unified approach to food and this is sort of one of the benefits of, of doing that. You can strengthen those domestic resilience pieces. So for me we are food secure as a country, which is great. However, we need to strengthen our domestic resilience. And so that would start with looking at the policy coordination, the strategic considerations. So the food reserves, export controls, price stabilization mechanisms, which is like my platform, real food price. But out of those you could have calendars of how products are going to come on.

Amberley Brady [00:15:52]:
So Joe blogs down the street, his tomatoes are coming on on the 12th. I’m going to send them to the distribution center then and you know, KB’s tomatoes coming on on the 12th. Oh okay. Well we need to send them differently because otherwise you’re competing against someone, same product and maybe just because yours gets there first a day before the other, it can be rejected. Right. So you need to have those and then it goes into the B grade market where it may just be purchased for juices or sauce, but they’re not getting that the prices that they should. And there’s often no course for them to sort of ask why they’re just rejected. They don’t get an explanation.

Amberley Brady [00:16:34]:
So we really need to research these strategic considerations here and we can innovate. So there’s this place for the tech bros. Right. So that’s kind of what I’ve been doing with the piece that I’ve written about Help me tech bro. Because there’s biosecurity, plant health, international engagement pieces, supply chain resilience. There’s so many opportunities for the tech world to Jump in here and help with systems because there is this pivot away from it being agritech, which is that umbrella term really for anything that the application of technology or you know what that tech in kind of ag is. And really agritech is anything. So it’s like the GPS, the drones, satellite imagery, automation, robotics, AI, IoT devices.

Amberley Brady [00:17:21]:
But you know, it’s evolving. And so there’s that supply chain integration, there are farm tools that are integrated with farm management. So it’s evolving into a systems focus. And that’s where I really see that the security of those systems is going to be vital and really calling out for the tech bros to come and help us in this space because there is just so much opportunity and it’s. A lot of other countries have realized that. So the UK are focusing on agricultural digital technology and their strategy forward for that. There’s just a lot of, there’s just so much opportunity for us to do better as a country and do better for our farming community who have been there. And those farmers had been there through drought, through fires, through COVID 19 and they would endlessly send these items to us.

Amberley Brady [00:18:08]:
And it wasn’t that they weren’t being supplied during COVID 19, it was that it couldn’t get to us because the fragility of the supply chain. So there’s just the barriers here are not, they’re not things that we can’t solve. It’s about really putting that now and how do we address them. And the tech industry has, you know, we’ve seen it with financial services, we’ve seen it with transportation, we’ve seen it, you know, when they brought Uber in, we’ve seen them disrupt industry amazingly over, you know, the last 20 years. And agriculture really has its moment. And I want everyone to focus on it because it’s imperative we get this right. This is not something that we can mess around with. It’s food, it’s vital and it’s ensuring that our next generation can eat and afford to eat.

Amberley Brady [00:19:02]:
Because going back to kind of, you know what I said in the beginning around that availability and the access, we have sufficient quality quantities but we need to have people being able to afford as well as having the ability to purchase it. Because you could be surrounded by fresh, beautiful fruit and vegetables that are pristine and incredible. But if you can’t afford the $12 cabbage, you’re not going to buy it. You’re going to buy the 90 cent noodles and live off something so unhealthy. And you know, I remember and think back to the days in uni when I ate tuna and noodles. And I think I couldn’t have done that forever. But at the time, you know, when you’re budgeting, fine, we’ve all lived through that. But people are going to make the decision to buy the medication instead of buying fruit and vegetables.

Amberley Brady [00:19:50]:
And I just think this is not the Australia I grew up in. This is not the Australia I want to live in. And we deserve better. And I really want to help our country get to a position where this is. Food is available for all of us. It shouldn’t be, it should not be a privilege to be able to eat. And even the United Nations, which is interesting, someone pointed out to me the other day, potatoes are listed in the United Nations as a staple. So it’s a human right to have potatoes, which I found was amazing.

Amberley Brady [00:20:19]:
But there are rights associated with access to food and I think we can do that better.

Karissa Breen [00:20:25]:
So going back to your tomato example, that was rejected. What happened to those tomatoes?

Amberley Brady [00:20:30]:
They were thrown out at the farm. Literally on the, on the side of the, on the side of the farm. And he was saying it was just so. It’s debilitating when that happens because it’s like they’ve all worked this whole farm and production have just thrown them on the side. And you may have seen images in the past of people dumping project produce, you know, perfectly fine produce that they just can’t sell. So if they can’t sell it, the first market and the secondary market is there’s an oversupply which is like the B grade fruit, then there’s nowhere for it to go and then they have to pay for it to come back to them. So imagine you’ve worked and you’ve worked so hard and you have all these people there helping you to get this produce and you get it there, it’s rejected. Then it’s rejected a further time from a market and then it’s like, well, what do you do with it? You can’t eat tons of tomatoes, so it just gets dumped.

Amberley Brady [00:21:21]:
We can do this better. Like KB, come on, we can do this better. We all know how to recycle food in our fridge, so how can we recycle this on a larger scale better? So yeah, it’s just wild to me to be to dump this sort of stuff. And why, when we need these items and if we don’t need them, then let’s have a look at why we don’t need it. But we need to figure out a way forward that’s going to work. And it’s really, how do we look at that strategic considerations around the policy coordination in Australia and who, who owns it and, and how to get that kind of funding alignment so that it’s someone’s, there’s accountability and that they’re going to focus on it because everyone’s sort of working in a siloed approach. And I’m not going to sit there and say government can work better, but in this space it absolutely can. And when we have amazing tech out there and amazing abilities to get data and amazing ways to sort of address all these issues, we can strengthen our domestic resilience.

Amberley Brady [00:22:18]:
And I feel like I’m sort of that person during the call to action saying, come on, we can do it. I built real food price. I went out there and I spent my own money to build it. And I worked every night getting little bits together and I had a team putting it together. But I would work on that because I felt I had to demonstrate to the larger community that it can be done. You just have to think, think about it, invest a bit of money and really kind of look at that policy coordination piece, getting the data, it’s out there. It’s about creating the relationships and how we can innovate, looking at other countries and what they’re doing. So my model was based on the Hungarian model, which within the first three months it saved 50 million Euro for the consumer because the items listed on their platform dropped.

Amberley Brady [00:23:07]:
Because as soon as you move, remove the murkiness around the pricing along the supply chain of the food, that value chain, as soon as it’s clear, the murkiness disappears. You’re able to see where the markup is and why and ask those questions, why? Why is the farmer getting such a small amount? Because there’s nothing in Australia that’s currently doing that in terms of the food transportation. And that’s why I built it. Because we need to keep more farmers in these roles. And how do we do that with an aging workforce? They’re not going to want to farm the land. And if they can sell those, those farms and make a profit for more housing, we will run out of arable land to do the farming. And then what do you do, what do you eat when you don’t have land to farm on? So once you start digging in it, KB, it becomes really dire. Like you actually realize, oh my gosh, this is really, really bad situation and it’s a crisis and we’ve all been kind of on this false sense of security around it.

Amberley Brady [00:24:07]:
And the more that I dug into this space because I really just started to want to make more money for farmers, but. And have more clarity as a consumer. But the more I dug in it, I realized this is a crisis and it’s a silent crisis and it’s creeping in for the rest of us and we’re not looking at it and fighting it hard enough. And it’s time that we go hard on it.

Karissa Breen [00:24:27]:
So I want to explore with you, like the supply chain. So, like, when it gets to, we’re buying it in grocery stores. So let’s go back to the farmers. So crops are being farmed on their turf, on their farm. A couple of problems come to mind and you can speak in more fidelity than I can, but one of which is climate change. So it’s like, oh, it rained for three months in New South Wales. We can’t grow anything. It washed out the crops.

Karissa Breen [00:24:50]:
The second problem that I’ve also heard is we can’t get the people to pick the fruit because people in Australia don’t want to do it. But then we try tried to get people from overseas in, but then we couldn’t do that because now there’s a lot of visa restrictions, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. So walk me through what’s going on your mind at that juncture.

Amberley Brady [00:25:07]:
Sure. So we can outsource some of these roles to tech. Right. And that’s around that labor piece. So there will be tech that comes in and there’s assets that will help with some of the labor. But there’s security backdoors that we need to really investigate, because if we’re importing tech from a particular country, we need to make sure that what we’re getting is okay and that there’s not going to be kind of. Because the. So example, for an example, there’s automated tractors that we could use, and that would take a lot of, you know, the manpower out of planting and turning the soil.

Amberley Brady [00:25:41]:
But it’s connected. So where’s that system sit? What’s the Iot information being fed back to this other country? So there’s that side, but then also. Yeah, absolutely. There’s. There’s these climate change. I mean, you could call them climate change issues, or there are also just bad seasons. Right. So what we’re seeing now is the potato season has been particularly rough.

Amberley Brady [00:26:05]:
And I know I’ve gone to buy potatoes and they haven’t been available and sometimes the prices have tripled. Right. So it’s crazy pricing for potatoes. So there’s all these different kinds of ways that we need to look at the system. But what happens when there’s a potato shortage around country? We look at a different area. So they, at the moment they’re being supplied from South Australia and Tasmania, where they would have traditionally come from Melbourne or Victoria. And what has happened to some of those items is we’re getting, you know, B grade potatoes and we’re paying a premium for them. And, and they’re ugly.

Amberley Brady [00:26:44]:
I mean, they’re deemed the ugly kind of veggie, but people have to have it and, and that’s fine. People are still eating them and nothing’s happening.

Karissa Breen [00:26:51]:
Does it matter if it looks like. Because don’t you just eat it? If you cut it up? Does anyone know? Like, is there really maybe.

Amberley Brady [00:26:57]:
And I mean, who, who would have pushed for that? KB, who do you think’s pushing large.

Karissa Breen [00:27:13]:
Supermarkets to sell them and to mark the price up?

Amberley Brady [00:27:16]:
Well, exactly. You want to sell a premium product because you can put a premium on top of it. If you’re selling something ugly and someone was laughing about it yesterday, they’re like, you could go to a farmer’s market and sell something as a farmer and say like, oh, it’s this and this and this and all these kinds of things. And people love it because you’re there. So the supermarkets have worked out that their point of making a larger profit is of perfect. Right. So they want only perfect items to sell. And that’s kind of.

Amberley Brady [00:27:45]:
Then they’ve got the imperfect range. And I’d like to think that they do support the imperfect fruit. But if you have a look, it’s blemish free and if it has a blemish, they put a note there saying why it’s blemished. So there’s this creation of perfection that kind of dripped into society around our fruit and vegetables, which is, you know, I don’t have a problem with eating something that’s not perfectly formed. You know, the fruit and vegetables that I would consumer, I use a thing called box divvy where I get my fruit vegetables from and I pick them up from a local woman once a week and I place my order and I wouldn’t have a clue if it’s ugly or not. It’s just they go out and they source what they can and at a good price. And they support farmers that are a part of this collective. And I just think that it’s been a Sort of an artificial kind of belief that.

Amberley Brady [00:28:36]:
That everything has to be beautiful in our. In our stores. Our fruit and vegetable has to be incredibly, you know, an A grade.

Karissa Breen [00:28:43]:
But I just think when you cut it up, you cut it up. How would anyone know? If you go to a restaurant, you’d have seen the end product. It’s been sliced and diced or it’s put in something. Does it really matter at the end of the day? Like, if it doesn’t look aesthetically pleasing?

Amberley Brady [00:28:56]:
A lot of other countries aren’t like that either. So I think there’s this kind of relationship that we’ve developed with that kind of pursuit of the perfect fruit and vegetables.

Amberley Brady [00:29:35]:
But it’s not reality. And fruit, it just seems like a waste of. Of time for everyone. And also it’s unachievable, I think, in the long term for farmers. How are they going to achieve that without, you know, very strict, like biosecurity around their plants or only particular kind of varieties? We will see less varieties, too, because people won’t be wanting to explore what works better and what to grow if they think that they can only sell it at a premium. So we’re doing ourselves a disservice in the variety of vegetables that we will receive. And that’s the other thing. When you go into the supermarkets, you don’t see.

Amberley Brady [00:30:13]:
See the variety that you used to. It’s very. It’s just like the navel orange. And there’s so many different kinds of fruit and vegetables out there. And that’s what I love about Asian markets, because they have all the different types of fruit and vegetables that you don’t necessarily see. So I actually go to the fruit vegetable markets of Patty’s markets often and in Sydney. So this one in Flemington, there’s one in the city. And I love seeing what’s available because it’s.

Amberley Brady [00:30:38]:
It’s a larger. Is a larger availability. And people just need to be clever and sort of say, okay, I don’t want to necessarily go for convenience and really enjoy that journey with discovering food and how it really looks like, because I, I spend a lot of time now engaging with farm, the farming community and horticulture. And it’s really interesting about what people are picking and what they’re growing and how they’re growing it. And I think, you know, maybe it’s not what everyone wants to do on their Saturday and that weekend. Fair enough. But when it comes down to the nutrients that go into your body, you really need to focus on those and having a look at what we’re going to have in the future because we may do ourselves out of a particular product if we’re not buying it, just because it’s not, you know, being sold.

Karissa Breen [00:31:23]:
So now I want to focus on distributing those products. So via truck, I’m assuming. So even sometime that I’m. When I was traveling locally in Sydney, I’m like, oh, like, look at these huge trucks. Obviously they’re transporting food in them. So then there was another. You would have heard when, when, you know, the economic crisis started happening with fuel or gas prices started to increase, which put more of a toll on trucking companies, logistics companies, to get the food from a farmer that gets trucked into Sydney, that gets dispatched in the supermarkets there on a daily basis, that apparently attributed to the price increase because the fuel cost more. So that’s the other problem that I’m seeing in the supply chain.

Karissa Breen [00:32:06]:
So I’m keen to explore that with you as well.

Amberley Brady [00:32:08]:
So there’s costs to moving everything we do, right. And when fuel. So I’m not a specialist in fuel pricing, but when anything goes up, there’s always going to be a premium that has to be thrown on top. Right. So even when you move, I know that if you’re trying to. When everyone was moving through COVID 19, do you remember, like the cost of a removalist went up something crazy. So if you wanted to move your items just around the corner, I know we moved during COVID and we paid and we’re less than like half an hour, 40 minutes. We paid like 17 or 18 hundred dollars to move, whereas now it’s much cheaper.

Amberley Brady [00:32:46]:
So I think in terms of getting anything and having access to fuel, there’s always going to be that fluctuating pricing. And how do we look at creating that kind of addressing the, addressing that fluctuating of price? We really need to dig further into those, those costs. And they’re available, people know what they are and people do take advantage. And I’m not saying that that’s the, you know, across the transport sector. But people within supply chain can take advantage of, you know, those sorts of things on the tv. So it may not necessarily be reality, it may not actually be reflected. And we don’t have that evidence. We just know that prices for fuel would go up.

Amberley Brady [00:33:32]:
So we don’t have that hard, you know, no one’s done that sort of back end calculation. But I think that there’s a particular group that are looking at the narrative around that and there’s a lot of finger pointing from, you know, particular groups around what the pricing, where, why the pricing’s going up. So I think through establishing systems where it does look at that cost implication and removing the murkiness around the costs, we will have a better understanding of what’s actually happening because we can’t. And it goes back to that trust piece at the beginning we were talking about who do we trust in this space. And I know that the mum and dads out there that are farming, the mum and dad operators of truck companies and things like that, they’re just like us, they’ve all got a role in this and they’re all getting paid and, and working hard to ensure that things come to us. And there are people out there, you know, corporate groups that are, and you only have to have a look at their end of you financials and you know that there are bumper profits and if you ask why and where that money’s coming from and start looking back from there, you’ll realize that there are, there are profits being made. So how do we look at where that, that markup is? Right, we have to look at food pricing and then you look at the, the costs outside of that too. And there are, you know, there’s levies that the farmers have to pay as well.

Amberley Brady [00:35:05]:
But we have to make sure that our system is resilient enough so that we don’t have those issues with COVID 19 and if petrol prices go up, then it’s easy to see that it’s gone up for a period and then when it comes back down, we should be able to see the pricing come back down, but it just hasn’t been demonstrated. KB and I just think that that’s something we have to do better.

Amberley Brady [00:36:27]:
We have to do better in this space and through, through what I’m trying to do, that’s what, you know, I feel that we’ll get there.

Karissa Breen [00:36:34]:
So now I then want to focus at the customer, at the coal face. So we go in store, we want to get something, you know, people are working, professionals, both parents are working, they’re busy, they’re just going to go to local supermarket because it’s down the road from where they live. Then, I mean, look, I haven’t done this show for three months, but I was aware that the food, the cost of just buying something has substantially changed since I was a kid. But a lot of people struggling, it’s too much, it’s too expensive. And one thing that’s really interesting to draw a parallel, people been asking me, like, what does food cost in the US, even with the exchange? So I’m still paying 1.5 of the exchange rate because the US dollar is stronger. I do think it’s cheaper overall to buy food in the US than it is in Australia. And people are shocked from that because they’re like, oh, but I thought there was less of it. The other thing is there’s so many supermarkets here, so if you don’t like one price, you can go somewhere else.

Karissa Breen [00:37:23]:
Not that I would do that because it’s about time. But there is options in Australia. There’s really two big players that are controlling that market. So then we’ve had the government come out to Albanese and friends saying, hey, we’re going to put a stop, we’re going to stop the food price gouging. What does that look like in your eyes?

Amberley Brady [00:37:40]:
I, I’ve it’s not just KB. I’ve heard it from other people that availability of the food, the organic food, the quality that they have and the price is just much better in the US and why is that?

Amberley Brady [00:38:56]:
Because we are really, you know, Australian people are really proud of their produce and how do we make sure that we are looking after the farming community who have always been there for us. So we need to look, we need to start asking those questions. What are you doing in terms of this food securities piece? And I know that they’ve established the Food Council and there’s been 13 representatives across START, so I’m really interested to see what the government’s doing there. And they’ve put three and a half million dollars to that. But really understanding what’s next for us and it’s dire that we do something now. It’s not something we can wait. If the rest of the world is already doing it, we should be there. We need to start pushing for it.

Amberley Brady [00:39:40]:
So maybe it is about people saying, okay, I’m in the US and we have better food here. And it is about looking at what other countries have. And I’ve lived in Norway that don’t grow any. Not that they don’t grow anything, but they grow very limited in comparison to Australia. And the things that they do grow in, in, in Norway, you know, there’s a price for them, but the import price of items is also cheaper than would be here. And that’s kind of weird to me, right? Why are they getting something from Spain and it’s cheaper? I remember talking to my friend, she was telling me the price of pineapples and I was like, oh my goodness. And they’re imported. So the price of pineapples in Australia was more expensive at the time.

Amberley Brady [00:40:20]:
KB and that’s why I want the security commit like the community in with me and I need them to work with me.

Karissa Breen [00:40:52]:
So what happens if the farmer says, well, I don’t make any money, Amberly, I’ve given up, I’m stopping doing something else. Then we can’t get food into stores. It becomes like COVID 19. It’s the hunger Games all over again. You know, people serve your food. Like people start getting angry, hangry pretty quickly. So what does that then look like? Just say, you come talk to me and say, hey, the food supply is substantially limited. Now, like what.

Karissa Breen [00:41:17]:
How quickly does that have impacts on other areas of society, on Australia? What does that then look like? Walk me through how you see it given your background.

Amberley Brady [00:41:28]:
I think it’s incredibly dire because once you remove the availability and access of food, people do crazy things, right? People. And you, you only need to understand like other countries when they’ve gone through lack of food and access and, and you, you know what happens from what you’ve seen on tv, it can be anarchy pretty quickly. And people are throwing around all sorts of measures that, okay, we’re only a couple of days away from anarchy. And I truly believe that that could happen. There are countries that have crazy inflation on pricing, crazy like thousand percent inflation on some other countries that you can kind of Google and see. And I just don’t think the Australia that I love and that I’m proud to be part of wouldn’t let this happen. So I don’t want this to happen for our country. You know, we’ve got a lot of different things happening, happening geopolitically.

Amberley Brady [00:42:24]:
So, yeah, there’s a lot of work here, KB and.

Amberley Brady [00:43:10]:
But we. We can do it. And so that’s, I guess, you know, the North Star is like, it’s not. It’s not lost. We’re not lost yet. And we. We can start. So I’m.

Amberley Brady [00:43:20]:
We’re in a crawl at the moment, and then we’ll start to, you know, walk and then a run is how.

Karissa Breen [00:43:24]:
I look at it.

Amberley Brady [00:43:25]:
We’ll start. Is there a part, though, that I’ve missed out? Crawling, walking, running. I don’t know, but hopefully not. But, you know, I’m ready.

Karissa Breen [00:43:31]:
No, that makes sense. Makes sense. I want to close now with just. How do you think we got to this point? Is it just your big supermarket conglomerates controlling the price of food? Like, cheese is getting beyond crazy now. Like, it’s like 10, 11, $12, and I didn’t even shop that often. So when I was going in there, I’m like, this is nuts. And I can’t imagine people with, you know, multiple kids and things like that. So, like I said, I’m spending less money here in the US with the conversion than I was like, in Australia for two people.

Amberley Brady [00:44:04]:
It’s crazy. So it’s been economically, I think, the last 20 years where the most in history, the economic standard of which we’ve lived in and you and I have grown up in KB has been some of the best in history, probably the best. So we’ve never had to really focus inward on productivity and looking at what, as a country, we’re doing. But it’s changed over the last couple of years, and that’s one part of it. So the economy has changed. On top of that, we’ve seen large organizations pushing out smaller suppliers of food and buying up large land reserves and buying up and having, you know, a lot of market share. And we haven’t seen any large participants into Australia for reasons I’m not 100% sure. But there are reasons that they’re not getting in.

Amberley Brady [00:44:59]:
They can’t buy the land to have the stores because, you know, if you’re going out there to swamp your competitor, you would buy everything up, wouldn’t you? And that’s just a strategy. And they’ve just been so clever in that strategy. They’ve played it and they’ve really tugged on the heartstrings sort of in terms of there’s nothing to see here, there’s no problem because everyone’s happy, but that’s because there’s a favoritism to particular suppliers. So some suppliers are telling us they’re not getting their produce purchased and then there are, there are ones that are always consistently being bought from and they’re the ones that are, you know, you see there’s advertisements where people are happy and smiling with, working with these, these organizations. So there’s a lot going on within that kind of narrative of what’s happening. But what we need to see more of is the accountability of what’s happening and figuring out who’s accountable and how do we look at what’s happening closely and really digging into the data because the data’s there. So farming community have to use like distribution so a platform to provide their pricing and their, their items and they get, they get a very clear printout of what it is. But they’re also sworn to secrecy in terms of what they’re allowed to talk about.

Amberley Brady [00:46:20]:
So they’re scared to talk, farmers are scared to talk through because of repercussions to them. So they won’t be purchased from and that someone else will be. So there’s a lot of tactics here that we need to stamp out that do not happen in other countries and there’s regulation in, in Europe around the farm to table and how you can engage with European markets and maybe that’s something that Australia needs to look at. But we definitely need to implement a system and I think it’s a mixture between the Japanese and the Hungarian models. The Japanese have an incredible model where there’s sort of the three layers of the way things move and they’ve got a much larger population of 120 million and you know, all the islands. So if their costs of fruit and vegetables are able to be tracked and have that information, there’s no reason we can’t. Because if they can do it on a scale times four or five, what we have, so why can’t we do it? And then if Hungary can actually look at the pricing mechanisms and drop, see milk drop 12 points within 3 months, why can’t we do it? So it’s really about working out how we can work together and having that kind of the strategic relationships internally and looking at our domestic market and the resilience of that.