Native bush foods and botanicals, the hardest category to fake.

Native bush foods are Indigenous Australian ingredients, most of them fruits, seeds, leaves and barks, sold either as whole product or, far more often for export, as dried, freeze dried, powdered or extracted forms. Botanicals overlap with them: leaf and essential oil lines bought by distillers, tea blenders and flavour houses rather than by grocery.

Two things separate this category from everything else we work in. The first is that the flavours are genuinely unfamiliar, so the sale is a demonstration rather than a description. The second is that the knowledge and in many cases the supply sit with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities and enterprises. A producer trading on that origin should be able to say honestly how the community it comes from benefits, and any buyer worth having will ask. We will ask too, and we will not put a claim of Indigenous ownership or benefit in front of a buyer unless the producer can substantiate it.

In dried and powdered form these are close to ideal freight. Light, ambient stable, valuable per kilogram, and with a long shelf life if moisture and light are controlled. A kilogram of freeze dried finger lime powder carries more value than a pallet of most fresh produce and takes a fraction of the space.

Fresh is a different business. Fresh finger lime and native fruit can be exported, but it needs airfreight, cold chain and phytosanitary clearance, and the economics only work into a market that will pay a chef price. For a first order into a new market, dried and processed formats are almost always the sensible starting point.

The category's real constraint is supply. A large proportion of native bush food is still wild harvested, which means volume varies with the season and with rainfall, and a good year cannot be assumed to repeat. A producer who quotes a twelve month volume off one good harvest will eventually have to tell an importer they cannot fill the reorder, and that costs more than the original order was worth.

• Novel food status. Several native species have limited history of use outside Australia, and some importing jurisdictions treat an unfamiliar species as a novel food requiring assessment before it can be sold. This is the single most common reason a bush food shipment stalls at the border. The species list has to be checked against the destination's rules before an order is accepted, not after.
• Botanical identification. An importer will want the species named properly, in Latin as well as in a common name, because two producers can use the same common name for different plants.
• Phytosanitary and plant material rules. Seeds, dried leaf and whole fruit attract plant health requirements in most destinations, and the certificate is issued per shipment.
• Wild harvest documentation. Where product is wild harvested, a buyer will ask about harvest permits, land access and sustainability. A producer who can answer that in a paragraph has an advantage over one who cannot answer it at all.
• Labelling and specification. Metric net weight, lot code, best before, moisture content and particle size for powders, allergen statement, and Arabic labelling for Gulf destinations. For ingredient sales the specification sheet matters more than the label design, because the buyer is a manufacturer.

A defined species list rather than a general offer of bush foods. A specification per line, including moisture and particle size where it applies, because a manufacturer cannot buy a flavour description. An honest account of supply and seasonality, including the months you cannot supply. Clarity about the relationship with the community or land the product comes from, if that is part of the story. And a price you set yourself, ex works, that you can hold long enough for an importer to run their own numbers.

Straight answers about a category that is easy to romanticise. If a species has a novel food question hanging over it in your market, we will say so before you spend money on it. If a producer's supply is seasonal, you will hear the months. You contract with the producer, at the producer's price, and we add nothing to it.

The tests every category has to pass are set out under what we take to market. The sibling categories are exporting Australian honey and exporting gourmet pantry lines, and the plain account of how far along this business is sits on our honest status, including the gaps.