MARIE PICCONE

MANGO GROWER

KATHERINE, NT

When an opportunity arose, the talented grower took her chance to dominate the mango market.

If you’ve eaten a mango in Australia, there’s a strong possibility it has come from one of Marie Piccone’s farms. Manbulloo is Australia’s biggest producer of Kensington Pride/Bowen and R2E2 mangoes with farms in Katherine in the Northern Territory, Townsville and the Atherton Tablelands

Piccone was a horticultural consultant and her husband a Qantas pilot up until 2005 when an opportunity came along to purchase some rundown farms. “I thought, well, this is my chance to be a producer and manage the supply chain and create a better model than I’ve been seeing,” she says. Manbulloo has a long growing period

– Katherine mangoes appear from mid-to-late September until December, Townsville starts in mid-November until just after Christmas and the Atherton Tablelands begins a little later and finishes in early March.

According to Piccone, the Kensington Pride, which in blind tests is the variety overwhelmingly preferred by mango lovers, came to Australia as a seedling from India in 1888.

She says many people are either confused or don’t understand that Kensington Pride and Bowen mangoes are the same.

“It got called Kensington Pride because it was growing on a place called Kensington Park at Bowen. And then it started being sent to wholesale markets in Brisbane, Sydney and Melbourne and people started to talk about it, saying, ‘Oh, it’s that wonderful mango from Bowen.’ And so the name became interchangeable.”

There are, Piccone says, eight or nine different mango varieties in Australia and lots of confusion around them. “So, the one thing I tell people is to make sure you figure out which one you prefer. We get so much feedback from people asking: ‘Why can’t we get that taste every time?’ I think it’s because they don’t know that they’re buying a different variety.”

Unlike many other Australian crops, the majority of Manbulloo’s mangoes stay in Australia, as demand is so high.

“The research says that most Australians connect summer with mangoes,” Piccone says.

“I mean, they’ve been here for 140 years now and are considered the iconic Australian summer food.”

“THIS IS MY CHANCE TO BE A PRODUCER AND MANAGE THE SUPPLY CHAIN.”

MARIE PICCONE

Manbulloo’s oldest and largest farm, Manbulloo Katherine, is home to 65,000 mango trees. The farm is located 22km outside of Katherine in Australia’s Northern Territory.