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Central Australian seafood retailers truck fish thousands of kilometres to sell in the red centre, but high fuel prices are adding pressure to businesses.
Key points:
- Rising fuel costs have put pressure on fish retailers in Central Australia, who truck their product more than 1,500km
- Some businesses have increased their prices or changed their pricing structure
- Remote NT residents often don't have access to fresh seafood
The monthly average retail price of diesel across the Northern Territory in June was 214.0 cents per litre, but the Australian average was 183.3 cents per litre.
Alice Springs brother and sister team Gavin and Lisa Sibley are passionate about providing remote Australians with fresh, quality seafood from their food truck.
But Ms Sibley said costs were higher in Central Australia, because the seafood had to be trucked more than 1,500 kilometres from Australia's northern and southern coasts.
"We've got to put in the cost of fuel and that's not just us either, that's the the boats, the people that drop it off, the transport companies and obviously our own fuel," she said.
Mr Sibley said over the past few years fuel prices had doubled, and the business had to pass that cost onto consumers.
"A normal trip from Darwin to Alice Springs adds another $1,000 in the cost of fuel, so it's hard," he said.
Problem felt across the centre
Another Alice Springs fish retailer, Milner Meats and Seafood's Brad Sawyer, has also experienced the burden of increased fuel prices.
"The pricing has definitely been going up and up and up," he said.
"In the last say, eight months, our freight cost has gone up by about 12 per cent, which doesn't sound very much, but when you're getting in pallets and pallets and pallets of stuff, it all adds up very quickly.
"We've actually restructured the pricing of our seafood and a lot of the products we have in the shop now."
Mr Sawyer said customers now paid about $68 per kilogram for flathead fillets, whereas two years ago the price was about $45 a kilogram.
He said the business had some diehard seafood lovers, but demand had dropped off.
"Even with frozen prawns and seafood and all the rest of it, the amount we're selling is only about two-thirds of what we were two years ago," he said.
"It has backed off quite a bit, it's just getting too expensive."
But the extra costs haven't deterred the Sibley's from giving residents in the remote outback access to fresh seafood.
"You get the little towns like Tennant Creek, they love us coming up there," Mr Sibley said.
"We go down to Yulara as well. We're not doing much at Katherine and Jabiru now, because we're based [in Alice Springs], but we're ready to get back up there, because they miss us as well."
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