The Australian, Entrepreneur: FAIR-TRADE COFFEE A lot of companies are selling Fairtrade products at a different price to free trade products and pocketing the difference, Ed Charles reports SOME companies are exploiting the fair and sustainable certification schemes by charging over and above the premium they pay for Fairtrade coffee beans and boosting their own profits. Getting to the [...]

From The Australian, Entrepreneur: BOUTIQUE ROASTERS Unique blends stand out from the crowd, writes Ed Charles IT’S a typical Melbourne location, an old warehouse off the main drag of Clarendon Street in South Melbourne, better known for its brothels than its beans. If it wasn’t for the smell of coffee roasting you wouldn’t even know St Ali was in [...]

From The Herald Sun, Citystyle By ED CHARLES ED CHARLES meets a chef bringing world-class culinary innovations to a regional kitchen IT’S 7am. Chef Dan Hunter is collecting baby carrots, herbs and flowers from the garden at the Royal Mail Hotel in Dunkeld. Later, in the kitchen of the southern Grampians getaway, he picks tiny blue flowers [...]

From The Australian. Indulgence: Brunswick, Melbourne: Most visitors to this neighbourhood venture no further up Sydney Road than the Brunswick institution Mediterranean Wholesalers, which stocks more types of anchovy, tuna, cheeses, cured meats and olives than you could poke a salami at. But it is worth pressing on. Sydney Road may look downtrodden and the Lebanese influence [...]

From The Australian, Indulgence: The Curious Cook By Ed Charles I’M at Melbourne’s Prahran Market tasting tiny portions of dark European-style chocolate truffles on the end of cocktail sticks at Monsieur Truffe’s stall in the main hall. Some are of 74 per cent single-origin chocolate. Others contain a lower ratio of cocoa solids and are rolled in [...]

INTHEBLACK - In the trenches Over a thousand years ago whisky was born in Asia. Only now is it experiencing a rebirth. By Edward Charles. Chinese youths are increasingly turning away from the nation’s traditional potent spirits, known as baijiu, in favour of whisky as their alcohol of choice. In the bars and discos in Shanghai, [...]

The Australian, Entrepreneur: Victoria Angove continues to push her family’s heritage further, Ed Charles reports. BEING the fifth generation of family to enter a business founded in 1886 doesn’t preclude Victoria Angove from being entrepreneurial. At the age of 29 she is charged with developing the Angove’s wine company’s international markets to diversify export risk and build sales, [...]

BRANCH OUT TO SURVIVE By Ed Charles From The Australian, Entrepreneur: AGRIBUSINESS Finding new ventures can help grape growers improve their profitability, writes Ed Charles THE lot of the winegrower is one of feast or famine. After years of bumper harvests and over-capacity, there’s a drought. While this will address the supply imbalance, says Mark McKenzie, executive director of Wine Grape [...]

THE CURIOUS COOK Ed Charles June 02, 2007 I’M in the Melbourne restaurant of much-awarded molecular chef Robin Wickens, who is inventing a new dish, and I’m sneaking a preview. My experience of professional kitchens so far has been through Gordon Ramsay’s Ramsay’s Kitchen Nightmares. But in Wickens’s kitchens at Interlude (211 Brunswick St, Fitzroy), the 32-year-old British chef [...]

From In The Black - May 2007:? You know that coffee is a big and profitable business when the drinks and snackfood giant, Coca-Cola Amatil, turns its attention to it. Two years ago it bought Grinders Coffee, whose founder Giancarlo Giusti is one of Australia’s coffee pioneers. Grinders was founded in 1962, when coffee in the English-speaking [...]