home The story about Trend Products APA Pty Ltd
An exciting journey into the unkown
In Jan. 1993, when Josef Egger visited Australia for
the first time. It was love at first sight.
The climate of Cairns, Far North Queensland, caught his attention immediately
and he knew, this would not be his last visit.
At that time Josef owned a profitable landscape and garden design business in
Salzburg, Austria. During the winter season the business would close for some
weeks allowing Josef to travel around the world.
Josef’s passion for scuba diving took him to countries, which
have a warmer climate than his native Austria.
The Great Barrier Reef was on his list for quite some time.
When he arrived in Cairns in Jan 1993, he called his wife Hedwig in Salzburg
to tell her:
“Forget California, Australia is the place to be!”
In 1994 Josef and Hedwig bought a property and by 1995 they built their house.
Since then, every holiday was spent in Australia, during these visits they made
a lot of new friends and got to know the countryside. They learnt about tea
tree oil for the first time in Australia which was also a new product on
the European market. 1996 the chance came along to purchase a tea tree oil plantation
at Dimbulah, on the northwestern slopes of the Atherton Tablelands, Far North
Queensland. This proofed to be an introduction to the health products industry.
Due to circumstances outside of their control, the bottom fell out of the tea
tree market in 1999.
Josef and Hedwig chose to not let this experience affect
them negatively. The question was what to do next? Josef
had leased out his landscape business in Austria, it was
at that point in time that he decided it was time to sell
it, in order to open up new doors of opportunity. Australia
became Josef's and Hedwig's new home and choice of residency,
In 2000 they moved to
Cairns and spent some time considering their options.
They still onwed the farm in Dimbulah which they used
as a new starting point.
One Austrian speciality that they both missed dearly was
the pumpkin seed oil.
Pumpkin seed oil is a health product and part of the Austrian
culture. As there are a lot pumpkin farmers in the Atherton
Tablelands they decided to trial the growing of the Austrian
oil seed pumpkin, which they achieved in cooperation
with a local farmer in 2002. It proved to be very successful,
even though this was not an organic product. After this
trial they had enough hope to take the idea to the
next stage. In Februar 2003 they moved to the Dimbulah
farm and did more market research on the concept.
The conclusion of this research is that pumpkin seed
oil is a health product, and for this reason it must
be produced without chemicals and artificial fertilizer.
In July 2003 Josef attended the first Organic Conference
in Cairns and was convinced that organic production
is definitely the only option to produce this oil. Later
on they realised that growing organically is a bigger
challenge than expected, but it makes the journey worthwhile.
Currently they are conducting more trials on their
Dimbulah farm, and are looking for other local organic
farmers to increase production of the oil pumpkin in Australia.
In July 2004 Juerg Jutzi joined Trend Products, and is now a business partner, Juerg brings with him experience in global sales. In 2005 they completed and were successful with two funding proposals to the Dept.of Agriculture, Fisheries and Forestry and the Dept. of Transport and Regional Services to build the pumpkin seed oil production facility which was built in 2005/2006 and purchased original high-standard oil processing equipment from Austria. In Dec 2005 the Dimbulah farm applied for a full organic certification with a 3 year transition process. In Jan 2006 we produced our first pumpkin seed oil. In Dec 2006 we achieved the standard of Certified Organic Processor, reg.nu. 1179P.
At this time not have enough Australian certified organic growers produce the quantity of oil seed pumpkins to fill growing demand. Due to this situation the farm currently imports organic pumpkin seeds from Austria to supplement requirements.
