Pacific Trade Invest Australia Trade and Investment commissioner Caleb Jarvis has heaped praises on Fijian kava exporters saying “Fijians have very successfully added value to traditional agricultural commodities”.
He said Fiji kava had very good quality and well packaged.
“Fiji is leading the charge in the exports particularly to Australia with the biggest volumes,” Mr Jarvis said during an interview with the media at the 2022 Forum Economic Ministers Meeting (FEMM) in Vanuatu.
“Fiji kava is a very good quality product and it is a very good quality proudest and its very well packaged product as well and you know they are doing good work.
“I’ve been really impressed by is the quality of some of their packaging, the labeling, its state of the art. It’s modern, it’s, great.
“It sits on the shelf well and we’ve been working with a lot of Fijian exporters to help get them placement in Australia.”
Mr Jarvis said the next channel to market kava would be the opening of kava bars in Australia and that “some Fijian kava exporters are trying to do it themselves”.
“What we would like to see is how do we open up other channels to market and I keep telling people that look in America where kava bars are very successful and a big volume of kava is going into America.
“And a small part of the population is becoming kava converts and they are drinking quite a lot of kava.
“In some ways Australia has a bit of an alcohol society so it would be good to maybe be less reliant on alcohol and may be supplemented with a bit of Kava or something, it probably would be better for society and that is my opinion.”
He said the kava commercial pilot project launched in December last year saw almost 100 tonnes of kava imported in Australia for the past seven months.
