Next time you visit Coles, look for the unique and tasty, “bush tucker” inspired range of Red Ochre and Outback Spirit sauces, chutneys, salad dressings, seasonings and native fruit-flavoured water. 10 cents from every Outback Spirit product sold is donated to Coles Indigenous Food Fund, which supports Indigenous business development and promotes Australian native foods.
Every time you buy one of these authentic Aussie products in store, we’ll donate 10 cents on each of these products to help support Indigenous people and culture through the Coles Indigenous Food Fund. This year we raised $100,000 for the Fund.
The fund also helps to promote and maintain the bush food industry.
After years of drought in Central Australia, wild-harvested bush tomatoes were in short supply and unable to match the strong demand for them. This left Outback Spirit and Red Ochre, short on this key ingredient to our most popular selling products, bush tomato sauce, chutney and dressing.
To help ensure supply of these bush tomatoes, the Coles Indigenous Food Fund provided financial support, in conjunction with the Desert Knowledge Community Research Centre in Alice Springs, the Outback Spirit Foundation and the Indigenous community at Laramba, to develop a permanent planting of bush tomatoes in a number of keys locations across central Australia to prevent shortages of these essential ingredients.
Arnhem Land Progress Association
Coles support really does reach to the furthest corners of Australia. One of these close relationships is with the Arnhem Land Progress Association (ALPA), which operates 16 remote grocery stores in the Top End.
Coles provide fixtures and fittings for these stores, and offer staff exchanges, specialised in store training for ALPA employees and support for over 200 staff in their Retail Certificates II and III, with a number of store managers going on to studying for their Retail Diplomas.
Garma Festival and Dare to Lead
In 2009, Coles donated 1,500 cookbooks and $10,000 worth of products from our Outback Spirit range to Dare to Lead, a national organisation which focuses on improving educational outcomes for Indigenous students. Attendees at the Garma Festival, a celebration of Indigenous cultural heritage, were able to purchase these products for a gold coin donation and help support Dare to Lead’s programs.
Outback Spirit products can be purchased from Coles stores nationally and for every product sold, Coles donates up to 20 cents to Coles Indigenous Food Fund, which is used to promote bush foods and help maintain Indigenous involvement in the bush food supply chain.