Getting Australian drinks and premium food into market, and keeping it there.

Export is not a larger version of domestic sales. The margin stack is different, the buyer is different, and the thing that sells a product in a Sydney retailer is rarely the thing that sells it in Singapore, Suva or Dubai. Most Australian brewers, winemakers, distillers and premium food producers who struggle offshore do not have a product problem. They have a market selection problem, a pricing problem or a distributor problem, and usually they cannot tell which.

If you have not exported yet

The first question is not which market. It is whether the business can survive one. Landed cost and freight, duty and excise in the destination market, labelling and compliance, shelf life, minimum order quantities, and whether production can hold a reorder if the first shipment sells through. The domestic margin model rarely transfers cleanly. Wine sits outside WET on export, and because the producer rebate only attaches to domestic dealings, export volume earns none of it. Beer and spirits entered for export do not carry Australian excise. Either way the numbers have to be rebuilt before you commit, not after.

Then we choose markets deliberately. Two done properly beats six done thinly, and the right two depend on what you make, what it costs to land, and where there is already an appetite for the category.

If you are already exporting

The most common problem is a distributor who took the pallet and went quiet. No sell-through data, no reorder, no answer, and your stock sitting in a warehouse doing nothing for the brand. The second most common is price erosion, where the ladder from ex-works to shelf was never modelled properly and the product lands either too cheap to be taken seriously or too expensive to move.

Both are fixable. It starts with getting visibility of what is actually happening in market, then rebuilding the commercial terms and the support around them. A distributor with no marketing support and no reason to prioritise you will not prioritise you.

What travels and what does not

Provenance travels. Awards travel unevenly. Most Australian brand storytelling, written for a domestic audience that already knows the region, does not travel at all. Labels, tasting notes, product sheets and sales collateral usually need rebuilding for a buyer who has never been within a thousand kilometres of where it is made and has no reason to care yet. That work sits alongside the commercial work, not after it.

Channel matters just as much. Duty free and travel retail, hotel and resort supply, on-premise against retail, and the government liquor monopolies that still control several markets all behave differently. For premium food the equivalent split is food service against grocery, and it moves the pricing the same way. The channel decision usually drives the pricing decision, not the other way around.