Have you seen the Plus One Serve feature articles in Australian Grower Magazine (Winter 2026 p.38–39 & p.50)?
Growing demand from the ground up:Why vegetable consumption matters more than ever
Australia’s vegetable industry has long focused on productivity, quality and supply. But an equally critical challenge sits beyond the farm gate: demand.
Despite the essential role vegetables play in health and wellbeing, consumption remains critically low and is declining. Only 4.6 percent of Australian children meet the recommended daily vegetable intake. If Australians ate just one additional serve of vegetables per day, the impact would be significant – delivering an estimated $4.68 billion in health, economic and social benefits, including $1.38 billion in reduced healthcare costs. For the industry, this represents one of the most powerful opportunities for sustained demand growth.
From supply to demand: A national shift
The Plus One Serve by 2030 program, led by AUSVEG and co-funded through Hort Innovation, is designed to increase vegetable consumption. For growers, this is not just a health initiative, it is a longterm market development strategy.
As Plus One Serve Managing Director, Justine Coates explains:
“Plus One Serve by 2030 is about shifting the dial on vegetable consumption nationally. For growers, that means creating real, sustained demand – not just awareness, but measurable increases in how often vegetables are chosen and eaten.”
The program is investing in evidence based R&D to identify what genuinely shifts behaviour – what gets more vegetables onto plates, more often.
Why schools matter for growers
The school environment is one of the most powerful settings for increasing vegetable intake. The Pick of the Crop Plus One research project (HN25001), delivered by Health and Wellbeing Queensland in partnership with AUSVEG and Hort Innovation, is the flagship school-based R&D initiative within the Plus One Serve by 2030 program.
Building on an initiative that has already reached more than 250 schools and over 54,000 students across Queensland, Pick of the Crop is designed to generate the robust evidence needed to scale effective school-based interventions nationally.
As Dr Robyn Littlewood, CEO of Health and Wellbeing Queensland, explains:
“Schools play a powerful role in shaping lifelong food habits. When we create environments where vegetables are accessible, appealing and part of everyday life, we’re setting children up with habits that last well beyond the school years.”
Through a whole-of-school approach, vegetables are embedded into learning, school environments and community engagement – often supported by direct connections with local growers.
Growers at the heart of the consumption story
A key insight from the program is that growers are not just part of the supply chain – they are part of the solution. Evaluation shows that engagement between schools and local growers is a critical driver of success.
As one participating grower noted:
“Programs like this are about connecting young people and families to where food is grown and to our farming industry. When kids understand that, they’re much more open to trying and enjoying vegetables.”
Grower groups like Bundaberg Fruit and Vegetable Growers and Bowen Gumlu Growers Association have partnered with schools to support farm visits, classroom engagement and local supply. This connection is already influencing behaviour. Schools report increased availability of locally produced vegetables in tuckshops, alongside ongoing use of gardens and food-based learning. For growers, Pick of the Crop creates a new pathway to market – one that starts with exposure and preference, and builds toward long-term demand.
From proven program to national model
As the flagship school R&D program under Plus One Serve, Pick of the Crop represents a step-change for the industry. While the original program has demonstrated strong outcomes across Queensland, the new Pick of the Crop research partnership is designed to test whether these results can be replicated, strengthened and scaled across a much broader and more diverse population.
A key focus of the project is expansion into new schools and regions, including metropolitan, regional and remote communities. Importantly, this includes deliberate engagement with low socio- economic areas and Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities, ensuring that the evidence generated reflects the diversity of the Australian population and can be applied nationally.
This expansion is not simply about reach – it is about generating robust, comparable data across different contexts. The inclusion of a diverse and representative sample of schools means findings will be directly relevant to different regions, supply chains and communities across Australia.
It means the program is not just building awareness – it is building a repeatable, scalable model for increasing demand.
Insights from Pick of the Crop Plus One research project will inform:
- Rollout across other states and territories
- Integration of local grower partnerships
- Expansion of vegetables in school food environments
- Targeting of future industry investment and co-investment opportunities
Importantly, the project is designed for long-term sustainability. Pick of the Crop Plus One research project focuses on embedding changes into:
- School curriculum
- School food environment
- Community and grower partnerships
This ensures that once behaviours shift, they are more likely to stick – creating lasting demand beyond the life of the program. As the program expands into new regions, grower engagement will be central to how the model works in every community, connecting schools with local production and building demand from the ground up.
Starting Healthy Habits Young
The long-term value lies in habit formation. When children grow, cook and taste vegetables, they are far more likely to incorporate them into their diets – behaviours that often carry into adulthood. As these habits extend into homes and communities, they begin to influence household purchasing decisions, creating flow-on effects for the entire industry.
Pick of the Crop Plus One research project features a significantly strengthened evaluation framework:
- Comparative evaluation to determine which school-led strategies deliver the greatest increases in vegetable consumption
- Control groups, allowing outcomes to be measured against non-participating schools
- Standardised measurement tools, capturing changes in student knowledge, attitudes and actual vegetable intake
- Implementation tracking, ensuring that what is delivered in each school is clearly documented and linked to outcomes
This level of rigour ensures the program moves beyond anecdotal success to deliver evidence that can inform industry investment, policy and national rollout. This is not just about what works in one school – it’s about building the evidence to scale vegetable consumption nationally.
This project has been funded by Hort Innovation using the vegetable research and development levies and contributions from the Australian Government.
Project Number: HN25001
Pledge for More Veg: BACKING GROWERS BY DRIVING DEMAND
Australian vegetable growers continue to deliver fresh, high-quality produce for Australian households – but they are doing so in an increasingly difficult environment. Rising input costs and market uncertainty are being compounded by a more fundamental challenge: Australians are not eating enough vegetables.
This reality is why AUSVEG has made increasing vegetable consumption a core strategic priority through Plus One Serve by 2030. Central to this work is the Pledge for More Veg – a national mechanism designed to shift responsibility for lifting consumption onto the parts of the food system that influence it most, including retailers, institutions, foodservice, workplaces, government and the health sector.
The Pledge exists to ensure that the rest of the food system plays its role in supporting Australian vegetable production, regional jobs and long-term industry viability.
Through the Pledge for More Veg, we are calling on individuals, community-based organisations, philanthropic and corporate donors, and the food and health sector to formally sign up and work with us on meaningful commitments that help drive increased vegetable consumption across Australia. By working together, we can deliver better health and wellbeing outcomes for all Australians, support stronger regional economies and local jobs, improve fair and equitable access to fresh food, and build a more sustainable, resilient and future-focused food system for generations to come.
Good for People. Good for Growers. Good for the Nation.
Key impact areas
The Pledge for More Veg is a powerful public-facing instrument designed to attract pooled investment and drive national action through bespoke Action Plans, which will be measured and reported to deliver collective impact. It drives impact in four key areas:
1. Health & Wellbeing: Improving diet quality for physical and mental wellbeing, reduced chronic disease incidence, and vitality through better nutrition.
2. Equity & Access: Ensuring all Australians – including underserved, CALD, regional and remote communities – can access and enjoy vegetables every day.
3. Environment & Social Impact: Building more sustainable and nutritious food systems, curating veg cities, reducing food waste, and greater social wellbeing.
4.Growers & Supply Chain: Increasing demand to strengthen farm gate returns, create jobs, bolster supply chain, and support regional communities to thrive.
The Pledge features a Commitments Framework 2025-2030 consisting of 12 overarching commitments (action areas). Each signatory with a vested role chooses from 12 action areas that ladder up to one or more of the four pillars. Signatories will sign individual pledges committing to select items from the Commitments Framework. For food system and health sector organisations with a vested role, there is no direct cost to becoming a signatory – our goal is to keep efforts directed towards action items.
How this will come to life
The Plus One Serve team are proactively engaging with a prioritised list of organisations that have been identified through a comprehensive market review. This outreach is already proving effective, with early conversations being positively received as the team clearly articulates the case for investment and collective action.
Driving positive change through collective national action
Progress against these commitments will be measured with results aggregated and reported through national impact reporting. All commitments will be guided by SMART goals, ensuring accountability and consistency across participating organisations. Below are some of the key metrics we will be reporting on:
Organisations: Number of organisations making a Pledge for More Veg
Volume: Total volume of vegetables sold by type/format
Serves: Total additional number of serves of vegetables
People: Total reach by age, life stage, household and priority populations.
Be part of the movement
The Pledge for More Veg is about bringing the entire food system together behind one clear goal – getting Australians to eat more vegetables, every day.
We are calling on growers to back the Pledge and help drive national action – reinforcing that increasing vegetable consumption is a shared responsibility across the food system, not one carried by growers alone. This is a coordinated effort to lift consumption, strengthen demand and support the long-term viability of the vegetable industry.
See Full Australian Grower Magazine – Winter 26 edition.