Top gong for Harvest Moon

Harvest Moon CEO and Managing Director Mark Kable has won the Hort Innovation Exporter of the Year Award.

It is the second time he has won the award in six years after Harvest Moon exported around 6500 tonnes of fruit and vegetables in the past 12 months, an almost 50 per cent increase.

Mr Kable said the company had worked hard to establish new export markets.

“The bulk of our produce used to come out of Tasmania. It was sea freighted and it was mainly around onions and carrots,” he said.

“In the last three to four years, we’ve pushed into different countries with different products.”

Southeast Asia, Japan, Taiwan, the Middle East, and Europe are the markets Harvest Moon exports to.

Mr Kable said the award was not just for him but the company’s entire workforce.

“It’s not just the people travelling and making the new relationships, it’s also all the people in the back office doing the paperwork,” he said.

“Exporting is so much harder than just shipping into wholesale markets or Woolworths and Coles.

“You’re juggling all these different balls at once. It’s a unique beast and one that takes a lot of work.”

Established in 1981, Mr Kable said that exporting was part of Harvest Moon’s DNA and that its growth into other produce outside of onions and carrots was driven by demand.

“A lot of our existing customers have said, ‘Hey guys, what about this or what about that?’

“You’ve then got to put several people in that position to be then able to go out there and find that product, find that the customer, build the relationship and build the business.”

The company is looking to expand the range of fruit and vegetables in its already existing markets.

“We’ve got customers now that have heard we’ve got avocados, so those are lines we are now developing.

“We’ve started exporting watermelons into the Middle East.”

Harvest Moon was the only Tasmanian winner at the 2025 Horticulture Awards for Excellence, held in Brisbane.