FAQs

Ordering and Shipping

We most certainly do! We offer wholesale to registered businesses as well as registered buyers’ groups. Send us an email at contact.us@sovereignfoods.com.au and we can give you the details, send you a couple of forms to fill out get you set up. Main requirements are either an ABN or to register as a buyer's group and adhere to minimum order values.

We have a little bit more info here.

If you are just keen to save a little bit of cash and you aren't a business or regular buyers' group, we have put a few things in the website to help save you some dollars if you buy in bulk.

We aim to get all our orders despatched within 2 business days. Obviously, this will depend on the number of orders in our system and other issues beyond our control. If there is a delay, we will let you know.

After that, it is up to the freight company. Once despatched you can follow the courier's tracking details to get a better timeline. But if you live in a remote it can take up to 8 business days, as our courier will sometimes hand off the delivery to a local third party courier.

If you haven't received your package within the time frame stated on the order status page, let us know and we will get our investigator hats on.

At present we offer pick up from our warehouse at Moorooka in Brisbane on in the afternoons between 1-4 pm Tuesday and Thursday, and Wednesdays 1-7 pm. We also offer pick-up from our Sunday market stall at Northey St Organic Farmer's Market.

After you checkout, you will be able to select where and when you would like to pick it up. Please note: you will see our warehouse address throughout the process. This is a necessary thing for our merchant facility as that is where the inventory is stored. Put your order through. We will send you an email when your order is ready to pick up, the pickup email will have the location to confirm.

By default it won't let you pick a time within 12 hours of your order for the warehouse and 48 hours for the market. So if you want to pickup from us at Moorooka on Tuesday, your order should be in by 1 am on Tuesday morning (if you are awake then). If you want to pick up from Northey St on Sunday, please order before 8m on Friday.

We are hoping to increase the number of pick-up options, but at this stage need to limit it to ensure smooth operations with the rest of our goings on.

Unfortunately, we only ship to Australian addresses.

As standard, no. But we may do the occasional special offerings.

Due to the variable sizes of our products along with the variable shipping rates around this big country, it is hard to factor the cost of shipping into our products.

You may have a product over 25kg (including packaging). Standard courier services don't deliver packages over this weight, so the checkout says it can't be delivered.

We keep these in our online store for our local customers to pick up. We are working on packing solutions to see if we can start to offer options larger than 5kg.

I'm sorry but all our items are shipped by courier, so orders need to be shipped to an Australian physical address.

Sourcing

For a number of years, the organic industry has promoted international foods over that of Australian due to the lower costs of production.

We believe that long supply chains from an industry dominated by imports mean you are not getting the freshest food possible, nor are you able to ask answerable questions. Because we are able to talk to the producers, we are able to ask questions about how they grow.

For us, buying locally means:

• Freshness

• Transparency

• Supporting local growers to help even out the unfair balance of trade, thus ensuring we are able to keep farmers growing in Australia

There are a number of reasons buying Australian costs a bit more. One of the biggest costs to Organic farmers is labour. The decision to not use pesticides on their property means that a lot of the work needs to be performed manually. In Australia, we thankfully have strong minimum wage laws to ensure we have access to a certain quality of life. Not every country has minimum wage laws to protect their workers from exploitation, as such those countries with a labour-based economy can offer much more affordable workers.

Another factor is the lack of subsidies in Australian agriculture. In many countries with which Australia shares a free trade agreement, the Government offers their farmers a large payment to grow (and in some cases not grow) certain produce. This definitely impedes the ability of our growers to compete in an open global market.

Beyond all of this, there are extensive Organic auditing procedures in Australia which are expensive to maintain.

We are yet to find an organic Cashew or coconut producer in Australia.

No. We prioritise Australian grown over Organic. While in a perfect world all our products would meet both requirements. We do have some conventional products in our store due to limitations in the Australian Organic Market. Some of the producers we stock meet other social requirements that we believe are a net positive. We do try to be open and honest when describing our products’ growing methods, to allow you to make an informed choice about how you would like your food produced.

If you don't want to purchase products that use chemicals, you can use the filter at the side of the product collection pages to filter out conventially grown products, by ticking "Organic", "Biodynamic" and if you are so inclined "chemical free"

Due to the nature of our packing facility, we cannot guarantee there has been no cross-contamination with Glutinous products. We only have one warehouse and we also store and pack products containing gluten as well as nuts (including peanuts) and soy.


While every effort is made to reduce cross-contamination, we can’t guarantee a small amount of cross-contamination has not occurred.

Unfortunately, there are no such things as Gluten Free Oats, and it is illegal to name them as such in Australia. The term ‘gluten’ is used to collectively describe the grain storage proteins (‘prolamins’) from wheat, rye and barley that are toxic to people with coeliac disease. These prolamins have different names in different grains, 'gliadin' in wheat, 'hordein' in barley and 'secalin' in rye. In people with coeliac disease, these proteins can cause issues in the small intestine preventing them from absorbing nutrients. Oats contain a related prolamin called avenin, which can’t be tested via standard gluten testing. There remains some uncertainty over whether avenin from oats is harmful to people with coeliac disease, with the biggest problem being you can't tell without a biopsy.

Coeliac Australia has a wonderful post on their website explaining "Gluten Free" Oats.

We store and process products that contain gluten, nuts (including peanuts when we can get them), and soy.

While we make every effort to reduce the risks of cross-contamination - including: changing and cleaning equipment between batches etc - we can't guarantee trace elements aren't transferred.

Other FAQs

As all our grains, nuts and seeds are free of herbicides and insecticides, there is an increased chance for these products to contain insect eggs.
Unfortunately, as the products are packaged there is very little chance we will see any signs of pests. To reduce risk at our end, we store all our food products in a cool room at 12ºC and below 50% humidity.

We recommend storing your dry goods - particularly in summer in Queensland - below 16ºC. 16ºC is the temperature at which insects such as weevils and moths are able to metabolise and thus complete their lifecycle.

The compostable bags we use to pack your goodies in are not airtight and are designed as a transport vehicle. When you get home, we recommend putting your goodies into airtight containers.

If you are unlucky to see weevils or pantry moth, put your products in the freezer for 48 hours or more to kill off the insects and leave their eggs unviable.

When we use the term organic to describe any of our products, it means it has been produced in accordance with the National Standard for Organic and Biodynamic Produce. This means the food is produced without the use of synthetic inputs and approved by a government-approved certification body.  Before a product can be labelled organic, a government-approved certifier inspects the farm where the food is grown to make sure the farmer is following all the rules necessary to meet government standards.

Biodynamic is a form of organic farming It shares a number of the same principles with organic including no synthetic inputs, instead preferring to use natural means of fertilising and pest control. Biodynamic agriculture was originally developed in the 1920’s by Rudolph Steiner and is considered to be one of the earliest organic agricultural movements. Biodynamic farmers recognise the interrelatedness of soil fertility, plant growth and animal health. Like Organic, to be able to be called Biodynamic in the market, the product needs to be certified by a recognised certification body.

For more information about Biodynamic farming, we recommend you have a look at both the Biodynamic Association or the Biodynamic Agriculture Australia.

Chemical-free means that the grower has not used synthetic pesticides on their crops, but has not gone through the certification process. This means while often better than conventional crops, they have not had the rigorous auditing procedure and may still use synthetic fertilisers. These independent audits are important for peace of mind. While we talk to our chemical-free growers about farming practices, there is a lot to ask and we may not cover everything and therefore can not guarantee we haven't missed anything.

If there is something else you want to know, please ask.